When Small Things Become Unstoppable How Brian Arthur’s most dangerous idea explained why markets trend, and why the profession tried to bury it In 1983, W. Brian Arthur finished a paper that he believed would change economics. He was not...
The Bar Problem That Explains Every Market Why predictive strategies destroy themselves in reflexive markets, and why the edge that feeds on them never decays There is a bar on Canyon Road in Santa Fe, New Mexico, called El Farol....
Do Anything You Like, Providing It Is Not Conventional How a group of renegade scientists dropped the most sacred assumption in economics, and accidentally explained why trend following works I have spent most of my career trying to answer a...
Ten episodes. Sixty-eight markets. Forty-one years. One verdict. Over the past few weeks, we published a ten-part research series that asked the most fundamental question in finance: are markets random? We did not ask this question theoretically. We tested it...
The Verdict The case is closed. Here is what we proved, and what it means for everyone who trades, invests, or manages risk. We began this series with a single question. Are financial markets random? For over a century, the...
The Architecture Seven lines of evidence. One mechanism. A complete explanation of why markets behave the way they do. This series began with a question. If markets are random, why do they carry memory? If returns are independent, why does...
The Permanent Signature Forty years. Five market crises. A complete technological revolution. The fingerprint never disappeared. We have established that the fingerprint exists across markets. Every asset class. Every continent. Every exchange. The universality across space is complete. But universality...
The Dial We swept feedback from zero to maximum and watched the random walk shatter at a single critical threshold. Episode 5 answered the binary question. Is feedback the cause? Yes. Remove it and the fingerprint vanishes. Restore it and...
The Null World We built a market with no feedback. Every signature vanished. We turned feedback on. Every signature returned. Over four episodes, we have built a circumstantial case. Markets carry memory. The memory is deep. The tails are fat....
The Fingerprint Sixty-eight markets that share nothing in common produce the same statistical DNA. There is only one explanation. Over the first three episodes, we have uncovered three distinct signatures. Episode 1 found that markets carry memory in their volatility:...
