Subtitled "How a Band of Maverick Physicists Used Chaos Theory to Trade Their Way To a Fortune On Wall Street." Excerpted in The New Yorker and hailed by the business press, The Predictors
is destined to become a classic of its generation--an antic, subversive
odyssey into a universe defined by the mystical convergence of physics
and finance. How could a couple of rumpled physicists in sandals
and Eat-the-Rich T-shirts, piling computers into an adobe house in Santa
Fe, hope to take on the masters of the universe from Morgan Stanley?
Doyne Farmer and Norman Packard may never have read The Wall Street Journal,
but they happen to be among the founders of the new sciences of chaos
and complexity. Who better to try to find order in the apparently
un-reasoned chaos of the global financial markets? Thomas A. Bass takes
us inside their start-up company, following it from its inception as a
motley collection of long-haired Ph.D.s to its passage into the centers
of financial power, where "the predictors" find investors and finally go
live with real money. The Predictors is a dizzying, often hilarious tale of genius and greed. 309 Pgs. 1999