Series Synopsis
Structure is not built. It is what remains.
A companion essay series to Complex Adaptive Markets: How Living Systems Shape Finance
Most of us were raised to believe the world is made of things. This series argues that it is not. Reality is not a collection of objects that happen to move. It is the moving, an unbroken process, and its structure is not built up but carved out, whatever survives after everything that could not hold has been stripped away. Across six short essays, The Universe is a Verb follows that single idea from the structure of the cosmos to the behaviour of financial markets, and asks what it means to live and to trade inside a world that will not hold still.
It is a companion to Complex Adaptive Markets: How Living Systems Shape Finance, the book in which these market dynamics are worked out in full practical depth. The series sets out the way of seeing that runs beneath them, in prose written for the general reader rather than the specialist. Its aim is transformative rather than informative. Not a set of facts to be learned, but a change in the light you see by.
The argument does not accumulate. It carves, taking away one hidden assumption at a time.
- The Game That Builds Its Own Board. Reality is not built but carved, and the universe is not infinite because it is unfinished.
- The Rheomode. Our noun-heavy language freezes a world of verbs into things and hides the process beneath them.
- There Is No Basement. Drill into any thing, the coin, the cell, the price, and it thins into process. There is no final substance at the bottom.
- How Big Is a Complex Adaptive System? A process has no fixed size and no fixed edge, and the question of how big it is comes apart in the hand.
- The Navigator’s Universe. A world that is determined but computationally irreducible cannot be predicted or mapped, only navigated.
- Why We Wrote This. What remains once the false comforts are gone, and how to live and trade within a world made of process.
Each essay leaves the reader with an image rather than a conclusion: a board that carves itself, a flame that is an event rather than a thing, a coin that thins to nothing under attention, a murmuration with no edge, a wayfinder reading an open sea. Together they train a way of standing in an uncertain world that is steadier than the one most of us were taught. Not prediction, which a living world makes incoherent, but navigation: reading what is in front of you, moving with it, and adapting faster than the world can leave you behind.
The universe is a verb. You are part of the moving, carved by the same pressure that carves everything, and real for exactly as long as you cohere. The series is an invitation to see it that way, and to trade and to live accordingly.
Richard Brennan writes on systematic trading, complex adaptive markets, and the philosophical foundations of trend following at atstradingsolutions.com. His books include The Fractals of Finance, Complex Adaptive Markets, Carved by Impossibility and The Aussie Turtles Trend Following Guide.
Want to explore why structure exists at all?
Carved by Impossibility: What Remains When Everything Else Is Eliminated
The book explores the architecture of constraint, emergence, and reality itself, and what it means for how we understand markets, life, and the universe.
Available now on Amazon in paperback, hardcover, and Kindle.
Want the theoretical foundation for why trend following works?
The Fractals of Finance: Determinism, Adaptation and the Geometry of Markets bridges complexity science with practical trading implementation. With a foreword by Jerry Parker, original Turtle Trader.
Available now on Amazon in paperback, hardcover, and Kindle.
Want a practical field manual for trading trends and capturing outliers?
The Aussie Turtles Trend Following Guide: A Field Manual for Hunting Outliers adapts the timeless principles of the original Turtle traders into a systematic, rules-based approach for modern markets. Co-authored with Adam Havryliv.
Available now on Amazon in paperback, hardcover, and Kindle.