The Artificial Stock Market When physicists built a market from scratch and it spontaneously produced every pattern that trend followers know by heart, it proved something profound about where returns come from It began with a bet. In 1989, at...
The Physicist Who Beat the House Twice From roulette wheels to Wall Street to simulating entire economies, and what one physicist’s journey reveals about the limits of prediction and the power of responsive strategy The idea of using physics to...
All Systems Will Be Gamed Why adaptive agents always find the cracks, why equilibrium thinking cannot see them coming, and why the programme that assumes boundaries will break is the one that survives There is a general rule in social...
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 Convergent–Divergent Spectrum The striking feature of financial markets is that two opposing forces, those that oppose the prevailing move and those that amplify it, coexist permanently. The statistical signature of this coexistence is the shape of the return distribution...
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...
