PHYSICS TODAY "At once a compendium of Mandelbrot's pioneering work and a sampling of new results, the presentation seems modeled on the brilliant avant-garde film 'Last Year in Marienbad', in which the usual flow of time is suspended, and the plot is gradually revealed by numerous but slightly different repetitions of a few repetitions of a few underlying events...Mandelbrot writes with economy and felicity, and he intersperses the more mathematical sections with frank historical anecdotes, such as the events that led up to his work on cotton pricing and the embarrassment caused by interpreting US Department of Agriculture data for weekly averages as 'Sunday closing prices.' There are many fascinating asides on a variety of topics, ranging from the importance of computer graphics in science to the distribution of insurance claims resulting from fire damage...The reader who is open-minded and prepared to indulge one of our more influential and original thinkers will be amply awarded. All in all, this is a strange but wonderful book. It will not suit everyone's taste but will almost surely teach every reader something new. What more can one ask?"
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 5.0 / 5.0
A clear warning to all those financial analysts using N(0,1):
This book deserves to receive 6 stars.Mandelbrot serves up overwhelming empirical,statistical,and historical evidence that financial decision makers are dead wrong in assuming,contrary to the available evidence, that a normal probability distribution describes the outcomes accurately in financial markets .In fact,the Cauchy distribution is substantially more relevant than the normal distribution.Mandelbrot's work simply means that the standard theoretical models taught in all colleges and universities,the... more info
scientific way of evaluating price movement:
in this book, Mandelbrot is trying to prove that first, the price movement's distribution is scaling invariant, meaning a security's log price-change's distribution is same as with its 5-min's or with its daily's(or even monthly); second, price movement is not purely random/normaldistribution/brownian/random walk on street(they are all same description), meaning if u use normal distribution as one of ur bases for ur model, u will not only be theoretically wrong, but also be punished in real-life trading,... more info
A book to make you think differently about the markets:
To read this book you need truly to understand math and the markets. There is no questions that Mandelbrot is one of the greatest figures of our time. What he claimed based on his studies on cotton trading in the early 60s might not be close to the reality of today, but the way he approached it makes you think twice about the markets. Cotton trading is so different from stock market trading because it is either spoting trading or futures trading, and it is based on margins. The market usually has poor... more info
