In The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence
I won't pretend to understand the math behind modeling fractals, but the concept is basic enough: An object's structure appears or is the same even as you scale up/down. So for example, a tree has branches, which in turn have their own branches, which have their own tiny branches etc.
Mandelbrot argues that a market scaled by time acts like a fractal. If you take away an axis' labels, a trader can't tell the difference between a short-term chart and a long-term chart. A daily price chart looks much like a monthly chart which looks like an annual chart. This powerful feature allows markets to be modeled better than tools which rely on a bell curve assumption.
The book was interesting, but add it to the substantial pile of books that could have been just as effective as a much shorter article.
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