The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin and Reward - Hardcover

Entertainingly written ... this book is a brain-opener that adds hugely to our sum of knowledge. (Director)

Surprisingly entertaining ... As the founder of fractal geometry and the discoverer of the Mandelbrot set Mandelbrot is acknowledged as the father of chaos theory ... he is, simply, very clever indeed. (Martin Baker Sunday Telegraph)

The reader gets a clear picture of the history of finance theory ... the best financial read since Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Fooled by Randomness. (Philip Coggan Financial Times)

One of the 20th century's most celebrated mathematicians ... devastating analysis. (Financial Times)

From the world-famous inventor of fractal geometry, a revolutionary new theory that turns on its head our understanding of how markets work. Fractal geometry is the mathematics of roughness: how to reduce the outline of a jagged leaf, a rocky coastline or static in a computer connection to a few simple mathematical properties - to make the complex simple. With his fractal tools, Benoit Mandelbrot has got to the bottom of how financial markets really work. He finds they have a shifting sense of time, a unique dimension and a wild kind of behaviour that makes them volatile, dangerous - and also beautiful. In Mandelbrot's fractal models, the complex gyrations of IBM's stock price, the FTSE 100, cotton trading and exchange rates can be reduced to straightforward formulae that yield a much more accurate description of the risks involved.