Mandelbrot Suggests A Hunt For Financial Patterns

Phoe6 writes "Wired is carrying an Open Letter of Benoît Mandelbrot, the father of the fractal, to the wizards of Wall Street, calling on them to recognize a pattern in the finantial and economic trends in the world. Mandelbrot says, If we can map the human genome, why can't we map how a man loses his livelihood? If millions can contribute a few cycles of their PCs to the search for a signal from outer space, why can't they join a coordinated search for patterns in financial markets?" I'd like to see a debate between Mandelbrot and Friedrich Hayek.

Comments

Re:And what if we DID map it?

[squarooticus]

Exactly. The very nature of stock trading is that no money is created, it's only moved.

Can someone explain precisely how this got modded up? This statement is true only if there is no actual money in the market when you measure "wealth": i.e., if to measure its accuracy, you need everyone to sell all their stock and then measure the aggregate amount of money in all former stockholders' bank accounts.

The stock market in fact has a wealth multiplying effect, as all financial markets do: the "money" you have in $100 Yahoo shares isn't sitting in a bank account somewhere, but is instead being used by Yahoo to invest in other companies (through stock swaps), is being loaned to companies to make capital investments, is being used as collateral by individuals, etc.

Bottom line: stop talking out of your ass about something you clearly know nothing about.

Re:Already been made into a movie

[cheekyboy]

Guess the doctor doesnt watch modern movies, will he file a law suit claiming (C) on his mandybot?

Was he asleep for 4 years?

Tim, you're a loon.

[boojit]

hi tim

God, you're a kook. No seriously. You're a complete blithering idiot. Judging by google's usenet archives, you only have gotten more insane with the passage of time.

As for the rest of the slashdot posters out there who wrote the equivalent of 3sea's drivel but with the exception of managing to spell the words the and chaos correctly, could I please ask you this: At any time did you think to yourself, "Holy crap, this is MANDELBROT we're talking about. This guy discovered FRACTAL GEOMETRY for chrissake--and added significantly to the field of study known as chaos theory. He's a Sterling Professor of Mathematics at freaking YALE and an IBM Fellow Emeritus. Maybe, just maybe, any retarded rebuttal I can come up with in 10 seconds could have been already considered by him maybe 10 years ago?" Hmmm, do you think?

DaC