the fractal market hypothesis: a critical evaluation of efficient theory and a new framework for...
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The Fractal Market Hypothesis:
A Critical Evaluation of Efficient Theory and a New Framework for Financial Analysis
Benjamin Weimer Honors Senior Thesis Wakefield School May 1, 2015
Benjamin Weimer 1
Table of Contents
Introduction 2
An Overview of Financial Evolution 3
The Efficient Market Hypothesis 13
The Crumbling Foundation of Efficiency 17
Chaos in Context 25
A Fractal Primer 30
The Fractal Market Hypothesis 35
Conclusion 41
Appendix A 43
Annotated Bibliography 46
Benjamin Weimer 2
Introduction
In today’s economy, trillions of dollars change hands every day. Most of this
money is not exchanged for goods or services like in a traditional economy. These
trillions of dollars are exchanged for ticker symbols and intangible stakes in a
company. These trillions of dollars are exchanged in commodities markets, stock
markets and currency markets where the investor has nothing tangible, nothing
they can hold. The global economy is dominated by these markets; they control how
one currency compares to another, the amount of funding a company can receive,
and how much tonight’s seafood dinner will cost. These markets affect the lives of
every person in untold ways, yet the investors, governments and banks that
comprise these markets use flawed tools that have been in use since the 1950s to
understand them. These participants recognize that their tools are imprecise and
flawed, yet they refuse to replace them because these tools are easy to use and built
into the very bedrock of the economy. This outdated toolbox is the Efficient Market
Hypothesis.
The Efficient Market Hypothesis is a framework for economic thought that
has been in development since the early 1900’s. At that time, we did not have
computers, or even calculators. The world did not know of Chaos Theory or Fractal
Geometry; these would come later in the century. Based on the resources available
then and mathematical tools at their disposal, the Efficient Market Hypothesis was
the pinnacle of economic thought. Yet today we have new tools, we have new forms
of Mathematics; we have advanced computers and technology that the creators of
the Efficient Market Hypothesis could never have imagined.
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Even with this new technology, many investors and economists cling to the
crumbling toolbox of Efficiency. With new and more modern tools however, a new
model for financial thought has been developed, the Fractal Market Hypothesis. This
approach is built on the concepts of Chaos Theory and Fractal Geometry, two
branches of Mathematics that have revolutionized all fields of science from Biology
to Physics to Sociology. Now it is economics’ turn. The Fractal Market Hypothesis
repairs the flaws in the Efficient Market Hypothesis by altering the assumptions and
mechanics to match the market we observe, not an abstraction of that market. By
studying the fractal nature of markets, one can understand how they function, why
they crash and attempt to predict their movements. The Fractal Market Hypothesis
is the future of finance and will reshape our understanding of financial systems for
everyday investors, governments and banks alike.
A Survey of Financial Evolution
Over the years, the tools and attitudes of finance have evolved drastically.
While we still have an economic system based upon the theories of Adam Smith in
The Wealth of Nations, our system has radically evolved and with it so too have our
tools for investing. We have gradually moved away from subjective analysis toward
a more mathematically rigorous approach. Our movement toward quantitative
financial methods has been a circuitous journey through Mathematics, Physics and
Economics. Today, as a result of this journey, the Efficient Market Hypothesis is the
very bedrock of all financial theory.
In early March of 1900 at the University of Paris, a young man was preparing
to present his Mathematics doctoral dissertation entitled, “Théorie de la
Benjamin Weimer 4
Speculation” (Mandelbrot 43). This young man was Louis Bachelier, a quiet student
from the fringes of France. His dissertation was the product of three years studying
trading in the French Bond Markets (Weatherall 21). At the time in academia,
Mathematics was a very cliquish and elitist field, with many mathematicians
preferring math for mathematics’ sake rather than pursuing any kind of application
for their mathematical principles. As a result, the head of Bachelier’s defense
committee, Henri Poincaré1, remarked that “Bachelier has evidenced an original and
precise mind; however, the topic is somewhat remote from those our candidates are
in the habit of treating” (Bernstein 20). The committee felt they would be hard
pressed to grant Bachelier a doctorate in Mathematics for a dissertation they felt
was not even math, so instead of the highest grade of “tres honorable” that would
have guaranteed Bachelier a professorship at one of France’s elite “École”
universities, he received the less noteworthy “mention honorable” and he and his
paper were forgotten for nearly sixty years (Mandelbrot 45).
Although Poincare and the French Mathematical establishment did not see
anything revolutionary about Bachelier’s theory, what he had presented to them
was one of the first ever works on quantitative finance whose central theme would
one day revolutionize the field. Bachelier’s central thesis is that the market cannot
be beaten as “the mathematical expectation of the speculator is zero” (Bachelier).
What Bachelier claims is that when an investor buys a bond in the market, he is
making a fair bet, which is analogous to the flip of a coin where there is an equal
likelihood of getting heads or tails or in the market, an equal likelihood of a bond
1 Poincaré was a French Mathematician who made essential contributions to a
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rising in price or falling in price (Weatherall 21). Bachelier prefaces this by stating
that, of course, the prices on the French Bond Markets react directly to newly
available information, but without any kind of revelations or new information the
movement of the markets is essentially random. Since movements are inherently
random and information cannot be predicted, the most likely estimate for any
prediction of future price is the same as the price right now (Bernstein 21). Of
course, future prices may potentially diverge from today’s price. In order to make
long-‐term probabilistic predictions, Bachelier employs a standard Gaussian
distribution, more commonly referred to as a Bell Curve. Using the Bell Curve,
Bachelier asserts that although the process is random, an educated investor can
predict the likely magnitudes of these random fluctuations as their variance grows
proportionally to the square root of time (Mandelbrot 49). Bachelier grounds these
claims in the simple observation that when a bond is sold on the market, the seller is
predicting it will fall and the buyer is predicting the bond will rise. Therefore, the
only way a bond can be sold is if two people disagree on its value, thus all
information regarding the bond is already factored into the market, so there is no
way that one individual can know more than the market as a whole. Thus
fluctuations are inherently random (Bernstein 21).
More than fifty years later, an unknown graduate student at the University of
the Chicago published a paper titled, “Portfolio Selection” in the March 1952 edition
of the Journal of Finance (Bernstein 41). This paper, as was Bachelier’s, was
relatively unpopular for a number of years, well into the 1960’s, by which time its
author, Harry Markowitz, had completed his doctoral dissertation on the subject
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and gone on to write a book on the matter. What made “Portfolio Selection” a
landmark paper was the concept of a Portfolio (Mandelbrot 61). Prior to Markowitz,
the financial dogma was to invest large chunks of money into individual assets
anticipating their value to rise. The concept behind this view was quite simple,
investors believed that they should be able to obtain vast troves of information on a
single company and thus would be more able to predict the behavior of that single
stock than they would of a whole bundle of stocks they knew less about (Bernstein
48). One of the most influential pre-‐Markowitz financial counselors, Gerald Loeb,
argues in his book, The Battle for Investment Survival, that “Once you obtain
confidence, diversification is undesirable.” He even goes on to assert that
“Diversification is an admission of not knowing what to do and an effort to strike an
average.” Loeb believes that diversification is in some way an admission of
uncertainty with regard to your investment (Loeb).
What the pre-‐Markowitz financial community fails to understand, however,
is the concept of risk. Prior to Markowitz, financial advisor’s believed that the only
way individuals could lose money was if they failed to predict the movement of a
stock which in turn meant that they had failed to gather enough information to
understand its movement. Markowitz disproved this assertion by exploring the
integral nature of risk (Bernstein 49). What Markowitz asserts is that failure is
inevitable due to the random nature of stocks. What was so revolutionary about the
portfolio concept was that Markowitz was able to quantify the old adage of “don’t
put all your eggs in one basket.” Markowitz showed in his landmark paper that few
financial advisors had ever been able to consistently beat the market, and even
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those who had would inevitably turn a loss eventually (Bernstein 48). Markowitz
bases these claims on the research by Alfred Cowles. Cowles examined the returns
of numerous financial institutions over a forty-‐year period and found that fewer
than 45% showed returns larger than the market for any given year (this is worse
than if predictions were statistically random) (Bernstein 69). Thus, Markowitz
argues that the only way to generate a consistent and reliable profit is to build a
diversified portfolio in order to limit overall risk.
Markowitz’s diversification strategy is not only built on owning a large
diverse number of stocks; he advocates owning stocks in as many diversified
industries as possible (Bernstein 50). Markowitz provides the following example in
his “Portfolio Selection” paper:
A portfolio with sixty different railway securities, for example, would not be as well diversified as the same size portfolio with some railroad, some public utility, mining, various sorts of manufacturing, etc. The reason is that it is generally more likely for firms within the same industry to do poorly at the same time than for firms in dissimilar industries (Markowitz)
What Markowitz describes here is the concept of co-‐variance, which is defined as
any factor that could affect the price of a stock that is shared between two or more
stocks in the portfolio. For Markowitz, calculating covariance is the most important
aspect of portfolio selection as it is essentially for the investor to choose stocks that
are as independent from each other as possible. This way the stocks will not move
together, so the portfolio would be less risky overall. Markowitz describes this by
saying, “The riskiness of a portfolio depends on the covariance of its holdings, not on
the average riskiness of the separate investments.” Thus by calculating covariance,
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an investor can find the best portfolio for a given level of risk. Markowitz describes
this as the Efficient Frontier, the line on which all optimal portfolios will fall
(Bernstein 48–54).
Markowitz’s theory was revolutionary in the world of finance, but it wasn’t
immediately adopted by investors because the calculations were immensely
complex. In order to analyze only fifty stocks, Markowitz requires 1,225 separate
calculations and by the time the number of stocks reaches 2,000, Markowitz
requires more than 2 million calculations. Without computers, these calculations are
nearly impossible (Bernstein 64). That is why Markowitz is often considered the
father of Modern Portfolio Theory; however, it was not until much later and after
much simplification that the theory finally garnered widespread acceptance
(Mandelbrot 63).
Before this simplification was conceived, close to ten years had passed, and
in that time the world of quantitative finance had remained almost silent, except for
an unlikely researcher who would publish an exposition on the randomness of
markets entitled “Brownian Motion in the Stock Market.2” M. F. M. Osbourne was an
Astrophysicist working in the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington State. He
had dual PHD’s in Astronomy and Physics from the University of California, but he
had no background in anything related to finance or economics (Bernstein 103).
With the approach of a physicist, Osbourne tackled stock prices from a new angle,
one focused solely on the prices and fluctuations themselves without putting these
2 Brownian Motion is a type of random motion that describes the movement of dust particles as they jitter in the air. Einstein describes this in his paper, “Investigations on the Theory of Brownian Motion.”
Benjamin Weimer 9
changes into the context of a greater financial theory (Weatherall 39). In his original
paper, Osbourne came to a few very profound conclusions. The first of these is that
the absolute price of a stock has very little meaning in and of itself. Instead, the
changes in price are what really impact the investor (Bernstein 104). Osbourne
justifies this observation when he states that, “The sensation of profit between a $10
and an $11 price for a given stock, is equal to that of a change from $100 to $110 for
another stock” (Osbourne). What this meant for Osbourne was that unlike Bachelier,
who was modeling stock prices, Osbourne simply modeled price changes because
these are what really get the attention of the investor.
Osbourne’s second major conclusion falls perfectly in line with Bachelier as
Osbourne asserts that prices represent decisions in a single moment. Thus, the
agreed upon price is a combination of the buyer’s optimism and the seller’s
pessimism. Osbourne concludes that the price reflects all available information in
the market and therefore the market is just as likely to rise X percent as it is to fall
by the same percentage (Bernstein 105).
Osbourne’s final conclusion was that the range over which prices fluctuate
will “increase as the square root of the time interval” (Osbourne). This directly
confirmed Bachelier’s Gaussian assumption. What is perhaps most astonishing
about Osbourne’s paper is his lack of experience in the world of finance (Weatherall
44). When Osbourne published his paper, independently corroborating the works of
Bachelier and Markowitz, he had no economics knowledge; in fact his original paper
contained only two citations, one for a book on Statistical Astronomy and the other
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for a book titled, “The Mathematical Theory of Non-‐Uniform Gases”(Bernstein 103-‐
104).
Osbourne’s paper gained widespread recognition as a groundbreaking work
that asserted the randomness of markets. It was cited a few years later by Stanford
Professor William Sharpe who published one of the first simplifications of
Markowitz’s Portfolio Theory in his landmark paper, “A Simplified Model for
Portfolio Analysis” (Bernstein 75). The ingenious part of Sharpe’s theory was that he
was able to simplify the complex calculations in Markowitz’s original theory into a
few simple computations. The way Sharpe did this was by identifying all the
possible sources of co-‐variance in Markowitz’s theory. Sharpe found that all of these
sources had one thing in common, their reliance on the market itself (Bernstein 80).
He was thus able to identify a single underlying factor behind all the sources of
covariance and that was the market index. Sharpe asserts that when an investor
purchases any given asset they are not only assuming the risk associated with that
stock, they are also assuming the risk of the market itself (Bernstein 81). By only
comparing an asset to the market rather than to every other individual asset, Sharpe
found that more than 90% of the variability in asset price could be accounted for by
variations in a market index such as the S&P 500. This theory’s debut coincided with
the release of the first IBM desktop computers. With the simplified model, a series of
calculations that would have taken 33 minutes with the full Markowitz model could
now be performed in less than 30 seconds. This made the model far more accessible,
with many fewer calculations and far less required computer time (Bernstein 83).
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Sharpe made another gigantic leap in quantitative finance using his
simplified model and a seemingly obvious idea everyone before him had
overlooked. Sharpe introduced the concept of holding cash into his model and found
that this caused profound results. At first glance this seems trivial, but the
introduction of an asset that had zero risk and a guaranteed return had a great
effect. With the concept of cash introduced, Sharpe sought to calculate the optimal
portfolio, and he found that there was only one truly optimal portfolio (Bernstein
84). Before this time, Markowitz had described the Efficient Frontier that contained
optimized portfolios for various risk levels. Sharpe found only one portfolio that had
the highest profit to risk ratio given the ability to withhold cash. A conservative
investor could therefore invest in this portfolio, but keep most of his money in cash.
A more ambitious investor, on the other hand, could invest in the same portfolio;
however, if she was not satisfied with the risk level she could “borrow funds in
order to purchase even greater amounts of a portfolio than her funds will allow.3”
This overturned the notion previously held that a portfolio had to be custom
tailored to each client. Instead the data showed that there was only one “perfect”
portfolio. Perhaps the most startling of Sharpe’s revelations was that that perfect
portfolio was the market itself. Investing in a portfolio that perfectly reflected the
market was the most efficient of all portfolios (Bernstein 86).
Bachelier, Markowitz, Osbourne and Sharpe were the pioneers of efficient
markets, but their ideas were often ignored because none of them had real
experience trading in the pits of Wall Street. The only way for their ideas to gain 3 This is an investment strategy known as leverage in which an investor borrows money in order to advance their market position.
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main stream acceptance would be to construct a bridge connecting the theoretical
with the practical, introducing these revolutionary conceptual ideas to the day to
day world of investment banking. That bridge would come with Paul Samuelson.
Samuelson was a professor at the Harvard School of Economics, famous for his
textbook, Economics, published in 1948. Samuelson left Harvard though for a
chairman position at the fledgling Sloan School of Management at MIT (Bernstein
112). Samuelson built on the foundation laid by his predecessors’ work on the
randomness of markets, but first he sought to explore the true theory of value. More
specifically, Samuelson explores the link between an asset’s price and its intrinsic
value. He concluded that there really is no such thing as inherent value, and the best
estimate of the illusive value is the price itself, once again agreeing with Bachelier
(Bernstein 117). Samuelson went on to claim that all available information about
the future is already factored into the price of a stock. With regard to this he wrote,
We would expect people in the marketplace, in pursuit of avid and intelligent self-‐interest, to take account of those elements of future events that in a probability sense may be discerned to be casting shadows before them (Because past events cast “their” shadow after them, future events can be said to cast their shadows before them). (Samuelson)
Samuelson in many ways reiterated the claims of his predecessors, but his main role
in the development of quantitative finance is that of an ambassador linking the
theoretical and practical -‐-‐ the ivory towers to the banks on Wall Street. Samuelson’s
book, Foundations of Economic Analysis, was the first work in theoretical
quantitative finance to reach a widespread audience on Wall Street (Bernstein 124).
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Samuelson, et al. complimented each other in their research, yet they still
stood alone as individual pieces of a much greater whole. It was not until Eugene
Fama entered the field that they were united into a unified theory (Bernstein 126).
Fama’s dissertation, “ The Behavior of Stock Market Prices” was a hugely
disseminated piece, published in its full 70-‐page glory in the Journal of Business in
January 1965. Fama presented evidence for the advances that came before him in a
more approachable manner than ever before. His later works united these disparate
theories into the bedrock of modern financial theory, the Efficient Market
Hypothesis.
The Efficient Market Hypothesis
Eugene Fama’s Efficient Market Hypothesis has come to be known as the
bedrock of modern finance. It has enjoyed intellectual dominance as a result of its
overwhelming simplicity and application (Malkiel 2). The whole concept of efficient
markets is grounded on a basic premise first introduced by Louis Bachelier. This
premise is that the current price of an asset reflects all available information
regarding the current value of that asset, as well as any information regarding its
anticipated movements. Fama brilliantly articulated this central tenets of the
Efficient Market Hypothesis when he wrote,
In an efficient market, competition among the many intelligent participants leads to a situation where, at any point in time, actual prices of individual securities already reflect the effects of information based both on events that have already occurred and on events which, as of now, the market expects to take place in the future. In other words, in an efficient market at any point in time the actual price of a security will be a good estimate of its intrinsic value. (Fama 386)
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Fama described a concept known as Informational Incorporation. This is the process
by which new information gets incorporated into an asset’s price. As new
information regarding earnings, corporate expansion, new products entering the
markets, etc. reaches investors, the market will adjust to account for these events
(Birau 1531). The individuals who Fama refers to above as “intelligent participants”
became known as “hungry piranhas.” These piranhas are constantly gobbling up
new information as if it was fresh meat (Patterson 84). The fact that intelligent
investors are constantly squabbling to react first to new information is what renders
the market wholly efficient. Any moneymaking opportunities or “inefficiencies” are
quickly and almost instantaneously decimated in this race to react (Malkiel 5).
The view of an immediate and direct response to new information imbues
certain qualities on the market participants. It assumes that individual investors are
rational and that all investors have access to the same information in approximately
the same time frame. This “piranha” interpretation of the Stock Market was later
described by complexity theorist Brian Arthur as an equilibrium model. In this
model the market exists in a state of equilibrium and once new information is
present, the market jumps to a new equilibrium state in a similar fashion to the way
electrons jump between energy levels in an atom (Arthur 2).
The expression of markets using an equilibrium model has an interesting
consequence for predicting future market behavior. This has become another
central pillar of the Efficient Market Hypothesis; market events are statistically
independent. This is to say that “yesterday’s change does not influence today’s, nor
Benjamin Weimer 15
tomorrow’s” and as a result market changes are purely stochastic (Mandelbrot 11).
This is built on Bachelier’s concept of a fair bet. However, it was not fully
incorporated into the Efficient Market Hypothesis until Maurice Kendall4 conducted
a statistical time-‐series analysis examining the behavior of weekly changes in
“nineteen indices of British industrial stock, and in spot prices for cotton and wheat”
(Fama 390). After this in depth analysis, Kendall concluded that:
The series looks like a wandering one, almost as if once a week the Demon of Chance drew a random number from a symmetrical population of fixed dispersion and added it to the current price to determine next week’s price. (Kendall)
What Kendall described is an entirely random system in which there appears to be
no connection or motivation for price changes to occur. Thus, one change is not
dependent on the last (Fama 390).
Based on the two central assumptions of informational incorporation and
statistical independence, as well as the more basic assumptions of human rationality
and universal dispersal of information, two distinct models have been created to
explore the implications of the Efficient Market Hypothesis. The first of these models
is the ‘Fair Bet’ Model, or the Mandelbrot-‐Samuelson5 Model (Fama 389). Within
this model, the concept of a fair bet is introduced to explore the future behavior of
the market. This was once again preempted by Bachelier and Sharpe, but was not
rigourized mathematically until Paul Samuelson in 1965. This model essentially 4 Maurice Kendall was a renowned statistician from the London School of Economics. 5 ‘The Mandelbrot -‐ Samuelson Model’ was described independently by Mandelbrot in “Forecasts of Future Prices, Unbiased Markets, and Martingale Models” in 1966 and by Samuelson in “Proof That Properly anticipated Prices Fluctuate Randomly” in 1965.
Benjamin Weimer 16
uses a mathematical simulation of a coin flip to dictate whether the price of a
security will go up or down, and then employs a Gaussian Distribution6 to describe
the magnitude of each of these subsequent changes (Fama 391). This model is also
occasionally referred to as the Expected Return Model. As the name implies, the
model can also be described using the expected return for a given asset. As
Bachelier observed for a fair bet “the mathematical expectation of the speculator is
zero” (Bachelier). This goes hand in hand with the concept of a fair bet, as in a truly
fair bet, the speculator should win 50% of the time and lose 50% of the time.
Therefore, by the law of large numbers she should expect an average return of zero
in the long run (Patterson 53).
The second model of efficient markets is known as the Random Walk Model,
and was pioneered by M.F.M. Osbourne at the Naval Research Laboratory in
Washington State (Osbourne). This model is often viewed as a special case of the
more general fair-‐bet model; however, Fama argued emphatically in his 1970 paper
that the Random Walk Model is a more rigorous representation of the nature of
markets (Fama 392). Fama explained the difference in the two models when he
noted that “The basic model of market equilibrium is the ‘fair bet’ expected return
model, with a random walk arising when additional environmental conditions are
such that distributions of one-‐period returns repeat themselves through time”
(Fama 396). Essentially, what Fama suggested was that a random walk occurs when
the market is in equilibrium for extended periods, and the random movements
begin to occur more evenly. A random walk dictates small random changes that
6 Bell Curve
Benjamin Weimer 17
arise at relatively even intervals. Since this model is a special case of the ‘Fair-‐Bet’
Model, it applies during a smaller variety of market behavior than the Expected
Return Model.
The moral of efficient market literature is that the market is so efficient in
processing new information that there is no way for any single investor to
consistently “beat the market” (Weatherall 156). Due to the fact that all available
information is already incorporated into the asset’s price and all pertinent
information is available to all participants, the Efficient Market Hypothesis holds
that markets cannot be beaten. In modern finance, the control group in any study is
a well-‐diversified portfolio that reflects the entirety of the market7. This portfolio is
simply bought and held. What the Efficient Market Hypothesis theorists purport is
that there is no single investment strategy that has consistently and unilaterally
beaten the simple “buy and hold” strategy. Thus, information is readily incorporated
and market behavior is truly random, therefore it holds that markets must be
efficient (Malkiel 7).
The Crumbling Foundation of Efficiency
Today, the Efficient Market Hypothesis is the bedrock of all financial analysis.
It is the underlying model used by hedge funds and investment banks around the
world to manage assets and is used by insurance companies and businesses
everywhere to manage risk and estimate profits. The Efficient Market Hypothesis
owes its universal acceptance to its astounding simplicity and seemingly unanimous
7 This is the strategy behind Index Fund investing.
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applicability. This was most certainly the case in the 1950’s and 1960’s, but with the
introduction of the computer and new more advanced techniques of analysis there
has been a flood of new data and information that refutes and even rejects many of
the central tenets of the Efficient Market Hypothesis (Malkiel 3). This new evidence
has fallen into three general groupings that encompass a wide array of market
phenomenon. These are Market Crashes, Market Trends and Patterns, and
Psychological Factors and Principles.
Market Crashes
Perhaps the most significant and often overlooked evidence against the
Efficient Market Hypothesis is the phenomenon of market crashes or bubbles. A
stock market bubble occurs when the market participants drive the price of an asset
on the market far above its true value (Mandelbrot). Once the market realizes that
these assets are wildly overpriced, the bubble abruptly pops resulting in
tremendous financial losses and often causing a ripple effect felt throughout the
economy. Perhaps the most well known of these bubbles was the crash that
occurred on October 20, 1987. This day is often referred to in financial literature as
“Black Monday” as the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted by “508 points or
22.6%. This drop far exceeded the 12.8% decline on the notorious day of October
28, 1929, which is generally considered the start of the Great Depression” (Metz).
The Efficient Market Hypothesis relies on a predictive tool known as a
normal or Gaussian distribution. This model describes a situation in which 68% of
market changes fall within one standard deviation of the mean, 95% fall within two
standard deviations, and 99.7% within three standard deviations of the mean. What
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is so exceptional about ‘Black Monday’ is that it was a 27-‐standard-‐deviation event
(Patterson 54). That means that the odds of such an event occurring are 1 in 10 to
the 160th power. Scott Patterson put this into perspective when he mused that “even
if one were to have lived through the entire 20 billion year life of the universe and
experienced this 20 billion times (20 billion big bangs), that such a decline could
have happened even once in this period is a virtual impossibility” (Patterson 54).
The fact that such a decline occurred surely does not refute the entirety of
the Efficient Market Hypothesis; however, similar events occur much more
frequently than the normal model would have you believe. In fact these market
crashes and price corrections occur with some frequency. A major example is the
recent 2008 subprime mortgage bubble, which prompted David Viniar, the CEO of
Goldman Sachs, to note that “we are seeing things that were 25-‐standard-‐deviation
events, several days in a row8” (Patterson 238). Other commonly cited crashes
include the LTCM meltdown in 19989, the Dot-‐Com Bubble, the Asian Economic
Crisis of 1997, the Russian Summer of 1998, and the China Bubble of 2008.
According to the Efficient Market Hypothesis, each of these events is a statistical
impossibility, yet they all occurred (Mandelbrot).
Based on the existence of crashes and their inevitable frequency, it is clear
that the normal model, which essentially precludes the possibility of any large
fluctuation, does not fit the true observable nature of markets. Crashes raise other
concerns with regard to efficient markets. Patterson noted that an “offshoot of
market efficiency is that, it essentially makes it impossible to argue that a market is 8 An estimated probability of 1 in 10 to the 60th power (Mandelbrot 4) 9 Estimated probability of 1 in 500 Billion (Mandelbrot 4)
Benjamin Weimer 20
mispriced – ever” (84). This goes all the way back to Paul Samuelson who wrote that
the best estimate of an asset’s value was the current market price of its stock
(Samuelson). If market prices are driven not by a company’s value, but by some sort
of investor stampede, then it is possible for a single rational investor to more
accurately predict the future price of a stock than the market itself, undermining the
very foundation of market efficiency.
Market Trends and Patterns
The Efficient Market Hypothesis dictates that all market changes and
fluctuations are entirely random. This is as an embodiment of a principle known as
statistical independence which states that today’s price is not affected by
yesterday’s price and consequently does not affect tomorrow’s price. This is one of
the basic assumptions required in order to the employ the normal distribution and
was introduced by Louis Bachelier in his original thesis. This assumption has long
been taken for granted in numerous kinds of statistical modeling, largely because it
drastically simplifies the calculations required to analyze the data. However, there is
ample evidence to reject this assumption outright, recognizing a widely accepted
economic phenomenon known as momentum.
In finance, momentum works just as it does in physics, like a particle, once
the price of an asset starts to move, it often continues to move in the same direction.
Momentum was first brought into mainstream financial theory in the 1990’s when
“Campbell Harvey of Duke University studied stock exchanges in sixteen of the
world’s largest economies. He found that if an index fell in one month, it had slightly
greater odds of falling again in the next month, or, if it had risen, greater odds of
Benjamin Weimer 21
continuing to rise” (Mandelbrot 98). Harvey also found that if a stock continued to
fall for two months there was an even greater chance that it would fall in the third
month and so on. This result seems almost trivial and common sense, but it has
vividly profound consequences for market efficiency. This means that there is a
connection between yesterday’s price and today’s, and today’s price and tomorrow’s
price. As a result, markets are not nearly as random as we once thought. Harvey was
not alone with these findings. In 1999, researchers Andrew Lo and Craig MacKinley
found short-‐run serial correlations between successive moves in the same direction
that allowed them to reject the random walk assertion of the Efficient Market
Hypothesis (Lo and Mackinley). Andrew Lo, Harry Mamaysky and Jiang Wang then
confirmed this result using different methods in 2000 (Lo et al.)
Thus, momentum plays a large role in dictating the value of various assets in
the stock market. Momentum is at play in the construction of bubbles and at play in
the duration of extended bull markets. However, momentum isn’t the only force at
work that creates non-‐random patterns in the stock market. There are a number of
“effects” that have been observed as characteristic of the market. The most widely
recognized of these is the P/E effect (Price to Earnings Ratio). Mandelbrot
eloquently described this effect when he wrote:
Financial Analysts often compare a stock price to other numbers to
help decide whether it is expensive or cheap. The most common tool is the price/earnings ratio: the stock price divided by the company’s per share earnings. Orthodox theory calls this a waste of time; P/E should be meaningless. In fact, several studies have found, stocks with high P/E ratios tend to perform worse than stocks with low ratios.
Benjamin Weimer 22
That is, of course, just common sense: A stock for which you overpay from the start is less likely to give you a profit (101).
The P/E effect demonstrates a very simple flaw in the fabric of the Efficient
Market Hypothesis; prices cannot truly be random if they are assumed to reflect the
value of the asset they describe. If investors are rational, they will anchor the prices
on characteristics and data that can be measured, meaning that simple calculation
such as P/E represents an anchor around which future prices are likely to center.
There are other simple effects, which can be seen in the market that manifest
in other forms. One of these is the January Effect, which quite simply is “a clear
tendency of the market to rally every January” (Malkiel 12). This essentially
demonstrates that markets tend to stagnate in December for a large comeback after
the first of the year. This effect is quite simple and purely common sense as it
follows closely with tax deadlines and periods of high consumer activity, but it
demonstrates another measurable inefficiency in the market. The presence of these
effects and trends along with clear evidence for momentum proves that markets are
not wholly random and that independence cannot be taken for granted. Without the
assumptions of independence and randomness, the theory of Efficient Markets has
no grounding, and thus can be wholly rejected.
Psychological Factors and Principles
Perhaps the most basic of all the underlying assumptions of the Efficient
Market Hypothesis is human rationality. The Efficient Market Hypothesis assumes
that humans are capable of always making rational and logical decisions. Research
conducted by Daniel Kahneman, a Senior Scholar at Princeton University and the
Benjamin Weimer 23
father of Behavioral Economics, argued the contrary. While humans are capable of
rational decisions, our brains employ cognitive biases and simplifying heuristics to
surmount many of the challenges we face on a daily basis. The first of these
psychological biases is known as the Anchoring Effect. The Anchoring Effect occurs
when people consider a particular value for an unknown quantity before estimating
that value. What this means is that if a person is exposed to a random number
before estimating a quantity, their answer is measurably more likely to be anchored
near the random value. This has an interesting affect on stock market valuations.
While at face value it appears that stock prices reflect only an asset’s estimated
worth, Kahneman found that the future price is disproportionately affected by the
current price, even if the current price does not reflect the true value of the
company. Once again, this shows that the ‘intelligent’ participants are not wholly
rational and that price changes are in no way independent (Kahneman 119).
Another of these simplifying heuristics explored by Kahneman is the
Availability Heuristic. This heuristic is that when faced with a difficult decision or
question, our minds often subconsciously substitute an easier question or problem
in place of the more difficult one. Kahneman uses an anecdotal example to explore
the effects of the Availability Heuristic:
Many years ago I visited the chief investment officer of a large financial firm, who told me that he had just invested some tens of millions of dollars in the stock of the Ford Motor Company. When I asked how he had made that decision, he replied that he had recently attended an auto show and had been impressed. “Boy, do they know how to make a car!” was his explanation (12)
Benjamin Weimer 24
Here Kahneman highlighted the Availability Heuristic in action. A
presumably high-‐ranking investor relies on his anecdotal experience rather than
using any kind of data to manage his massive investment. The investor simply
substituted the question of ‘Should I invest in Ford?’ with ‘Do I like Ford?’ This sort
of substitution takes place in the human decision making process all the time, and
often unconsciously. There are numerous other simplifying heuristics that our
minds employ to tackle the difficult decisions that we must face on a regular basis,
particularly when it comes to investments. Thus, Kahneman argued that it is unfair
to assume that market participants are rational, when many of the decisions that
they make are nonsensical and illogical (Kahneman 7).
Today, there is overwhelming evidence to refute the Efficient Market
Hypothesis. Market crashes and bubbles make it clear that the normal model does
not accurately describe the nature of markets. Effects and trends disprove the
assumptions of randomness and statistical independence, and behavioral economics
contradicts the concept of universal human rationality. With the pillars and
foundation of the Efficient Market Hypothesis crumbling, it is time for the financial
community to turn to a new model, one that will accurately reflect the true behavior
of markets while also taking into account the prevalence of market crashes, periodic
trends in prices and a lack of general rationality. In fact, such a theory exists and is
gaining steam in some circles within the financial world. This theory is known as the
Fractal Market Hypothesis.
Benjamin Weimer 25
Chaos in Context
The Fractal Market Hypothesis is an emerging alternative to the Efficient
Market Hypothesis. While the latter is based upon the laws and rules of traditional
statistics and calculus, the Fractal Market Hypothesis is based on the laws of non-‐
linearity, Chaos and Complexity theories. In relatively calm periods of market
behavior both the Fractal Market Hypothesis and Efficient Market Hypothesis
produce similar predictions with regard to direction and magnitude of possible
changes. The real disparities among the theories are exposed as markets become
more turbulent (Mandelbrot). As the equilibrium upon which the Efficient Market
Hypothesis is grounded begins to erode, the fluctuations and movements of the
market become non-‐continuous and in essence chaotic. Unlike the Efficient Market
Hypothesis, the Fractal Market Hypothesis is designed to describe the extreme
behavior, which was simply regarded as an outlier under traditional theory. The
Fractal Market Hypothesis is able to account for this vast variety of behavior
because of its foundation in Chaos Theory and Fractal Geometry.
Leonard Smith, a Chaostician at the London School of Economics, defined
Chaos Theory simply as, “the study of the way tiny changes in the way things are
now can have enormous consequences in the future” (Smith 1) Essentially, Chaos
argues that minute and seemingly infinitesimal changes now will grow
exponentially in the future. This principle is most vividly typified by the question of
the butterfly. Since the birth of Chaos Theory, the Butterfly Effect has served as the
quintessential question behind the whole of the theory. Can the flap of a butterfly
Benjamin Weimer 26
wing in Oklahoma cause a typhoon in the Philippines? The simple answer is that we
don’t know, how could we (Gleick)?
Chaos Theory really began to gain widespread acceptance in the early 1950’s
as meteorology was becoming more of a quantitative science (Gleick). Today, Chaos
and the related theory of Complexity have become major factors in all fields of
science, and we see the profound results of Chaos every single day. We have all been
frustrated when the weatherman assures us that Saturday will be a clear and sunny
day, but it turns out to be a dreary, rainy day. How can the weatherman, with their
multimillion-‐dollar models, be wrong more often that they are right? It is simply
because of Chaos. Today’s weather models take into account as many as 10,000,000
variables from air pressure and surface temperature to ionization levels in the
upper stratosphere. With all this data, how can they be wrong? Well, each of these
variables can only be measured to a finite certainty, for the sake of example, say
nine decimal places. Every number from the 10th decimal on now becomes what we
call uncertainty. As the model progresses this uncertainty grows exponentially so
our weather predictions for tonight are going to be relatively accurate and the same
for tomorrow, but as we move further and further out in time, this uncertainty
grows rapidly until our model no longer has the power to predict with any accuracy.
Thus, because we cannot measure the movement of air caused by the flap of every
butterfly’s wing we can never make truly accurate long-‐term predictions about the
weather (Smith 45).
Chaos Theory is a powerful tool for predicting weather and modeling
turbulent fluids, but it is also uniquely applicable to the analysis of prices in the
Benjamin Weimer 27
context of financial exchanges for a myriad of reasons. The first of these is simply
that the price of a stock only changes when someone wants to purchase it. That is
fairly simple and something we take for granted, yet the Efficient Market Hypothesis
views the movement of stocks as a continuous curve, moving fluidly from one price
to the next. Logically this is absurd. Prices do not move continuously from one price
to the next, they move in leaps and bounds. Prices jump from one value to the next.
In Chaos Theory, the assumption of continuity that underlies calculus and modern
statistical analysis techniques is shunned (Birau 1530). Instead, Chaotic Systems
are what is called a deterministic non-‐linear system. This means that each set of
present conditions determines the next set and so on. This is to say that the next
value in a system is determined solely by the current price and some random
fluctuation. Thus, prices can jump and fluctuate between disparate values just as
they do in reality (Birau 1530).
Another integral feature of a chaotic system is the ability of the system to
evolve or to react to its own changes. Jonathan Blackledge described this brilliantly
when he wrote,
In complex systems, the elements constantly adapt to the aggregate pattern they co-‐create. As the components react, the aggregate changes, as the aggregate changes the components react anew (12).
What Blackledge described is a system in which the individual parts that constitute
a greater whole each react independently to the reality of the whole that they
together create. At first a system such as this is hard to visualize, but there is no
better example of this kind of behavior than the financial markets themselves. A
Benjamin Weimer 28
Financial Market is in essence an aggregate, it is a price generating and data
churning machine comprised of innumerable components. These components are
the market participants (Ongkrutaraska 2). These are the Hedge Funds, the
Investment Banks, and the personal investors who work in tandem to generate the
numbers and the prices, which are associated with Financial Markets. These
participants do not share some kind of higher consciousness; rather they each think
independently, forming their own strategies and placing buy and sell orders based
solely on the market in the present. They are in essence reacting to the market, of
which they are a part (Arthur).
Attempts to model the whole of a system based on the behavior of the
individual components is called agent-‐based modeling, in which each participant or
component becomes an “agent”. Attempts have been made to model financial
markets in such a manner; however, even with three or four types of agents, the
models collapse as the behavior becomes immensely complex (Farmer). This vividly
mirrors the market itself as it is constantly evolving, developing new and innovative
strategies and re-‐evaluating prices constantly. Unlike the traditional efficient
models, which treat the market as a stagnant entity based on enumerated principles
and governed by discernable laws, the Fractal Market Hypothesis allows for this
constant evolution and change. Rather than adhering to the false assumption of
equilibrium, the Fractal Market Hypothesis accounts for the tumultuousness and
uncertainty that plagues our world.
One way in which Chaos Theory is able to account for this vast uncertainty
and variation is through the employment of modified distributions. The Efficient
Benjamin Weimer 29
Market Hypothesis is built around the Normal Model because it is convenient and
because there is a vast array of statistical tools to analyze this distribution.
However, we have seen, most notably in the form of market crashes, that this
distribution does not accurately reflect the reality of the markets as major changes
and events occur much more frequently than is purported by the models.
Mandelbrot proposed a different chaotic distribution known as the Levy-‐Stable
Distribution (Weatherall 70). This distribution is pictured below superimposed
upon a Normal Distribution curve.
As one can tell from the image, the Levy-‐Stable distribution is more pinched
in the middle, meaning that this model predicts more small changes than the normal
model does. Additionally, the Levy-‐Stable distribution has wider tails as one moves
further from the center. These are the most important features of the distribution as
these allow more events to occur within the tails of the model. Thus, the likelihood
Benjamin Weimer 30
of extreme changes or crashes occurring is greater in a system governed by the
Levy-‐Stable model than one governed by the Normal Distribution. This more
accurately reflects the reality of the market. Weatherall noted that, “The differences
between Osbourne’s model and Mandelbrot’s can hardly be dismissed, but they
become important only in the context of extreme events” (72). Thus, the fat tails are
the key feature that differentiates these two models. Unlike the normal distribution,
there is not a plethora of statistical tools that one can utilize to analyze a Levy-‐stable
distribution. Therefore, we must turn back to Chaos Theory for the tools necessary
to analyze this kind of chaotic and “wild uncertainty” (Mandelbrot). There is only
one mathematical tool capable of capturing the true complexity and beauty of Chaos
in a simple form. These are fractals, the tools of Chaos, capable of portraying such
complex systems and capable of modeling and describing our financial markets in
their full complexity.
A Fractal Primer
Fractals are complex mathematical objects comprised of infinite degrees of
complexity. Mandelbrot, often considered the father of Fractal Geometry, defined a
fractal as “a geometric shape that can be separated into parts, each of which is a
reduced-‐scale version of the whole” (Mandelbrot). Essentially, what Mandelbrot
wrote is that a fractal is a shape or pattern that can be regarded as self-‐similar. This
is to say that each part is a reflection of the whole. Mathematically speaking, the
construction of Fractals is incredibly simple. Each fractal begins with an initial
condition; this is a shape or an object that represents the base of the fractal. Then a
Benjamin Weimer 31
simple process, or a generator, is repeatedly applied to the initial condition in order
to create the fractal. An example is shown below.
In the picture above there are four unique fractals; the image on the left is the initial
condition, which is a basic shape from which each fractal is derived. As you move to
the right you can see additional iterations of the generator. In the first example, we
begin with a hexagon, and our generator is to replace each smooth edge with three
sides of a hexagon after each iteration. In a true fractal, this pattern of iteration
would continue indefinitely so that if you were to take a microscope to the edge of
the resulting shape, no matter how far one zoomed in the same pattern would
emerge. This property is known as self-‐similarity. The beauty of self-‐similarity can
be most vividly seen in the fourth fractal example in the above picture (Weatherall
55). If you were to separate the three largest triangles in the resulting fractal on the
right, each piece would be perfectly identical to the whole. This is shown below.
Benjamin Weimer 32
As one can see in the above image, if one were to replace the original shape on the
left with any one of the resulting pieces on the right, there would be no difference. It
would be perfectly identical to the whole due to the fractal’s self-‐similarity.
Fractals do not only exist in these simplistic drawings previously presented.
Fractals exist in nature and are observed on a daily basis. Perhaps the most
noteworthy example of fractals in nature is the shape of coastlines. Self-‐Similarity is
not always as perfect or as strict as it was in the triangles above, self-‐similarity
applies to all kinds of phenomena (Weatherall 55). In the case of a coastline, the
coast itself can be viewed on numerous scales. When viewed from space, the coast
appears rough; it contains inlets and peninsulas, rocky shores and beaches. As we
look closer, say from an airplane, we see that these inlets have inlets of their own,
and the peninsulas are not straight edged, but jagged like the coast itself. Then as we
stand on the coast, we can examine even further and note that even these tiny inlets
are comprised of rocks, some protruding and the water sneaking between others.
Even as we stand on the shore, we see the same level of roughness in the coastline
that we see from space. Therefore the coastline is self-‐similar, thus fractal. The same
Benjamin Weimer 33
principle applies to mountain ranges, clouds and even the bark of trees. Fern leaves,
forests, even the distribution of galaxies in the universe are governed by fractal
patterns (Mandelbrot).
Objects and shapes are not the only things that can be represented by
fractals. Time series10 can also display fractal patterns; in fact, one of the very first
widely accepted examples of a fractal pattern was described by Harold Edwin Hurst
in his research on the Nile River (Weron and Weron 289). Armstrong wrote “in
1951, Hurst defined a method to study natural phenomena such as the flow of the
Nile River. He discovered this process was not random, but patterned” (Armstrong
et al.). Hurst spent sixty-‐five years in the Nile valley attempting to answer a question
that had plagued Egyptians since the time of the pharaoh, why does the Nile flood?
There have been countless explanations from the will of the gods to snow melt in
the southern mountains. Hurst answered this by instead asking a simpler question;
how does it flood? To find an answer, Hurst examined the records that plotted the
past flooding of the Nile. He also examined flood records for other rivers around the
world and concluded that the flooding was not random. Instead it followed a “biased
random walk or fractional Brownian motion” (Ongkrutaraksa). This means that
each year was not independent, if there was a big flood last year it impacted the
probability of a flood this year, and a drought last year influenced the probability of
a drought this year. Hurst “defined a constant, K, which measures the bias of the
fractional Brownian Motion” (Armstrong et al.). Mandelbrot later changed this
constant to H in memory of Hurst. Essentially this variable dictates the amount of 10 A time series is a sequence of data points, typically consisting of successive measurements made over a time interval (Imdadullah).
Benjamin Weimer 34
“memory” a time series has. An H value of .5 describes a truly random process,
where each change is independent of the previous ones. An H value less than one
indicates what is known as anti-‐persistency, or a complete lack of dependence,
meaning the time series fluctuates violently. Worapot Ongkrutaraksa11 noted that
on the other hand if H is between .5 and 1 “then the series is fractal. The distribution
of the biased random walks is called the fractal distribution” (Ongkrutaraksa). This
means that there is “Long Range Dependence,” therefore if there was a large flood
last year, there is a higher probability of a flood this year and inversely, if there was
a drought, there is a higher probability of a drought occurring again. In essence, the
value of H, or the Hurst Exponent, describes the smoothness of a fractal object
created by the series (Armstrong et al.).
Fractals are geometric and mathematical objects that display roughness and
self-‐similarity. They can be used to create patterns and model the roughness of a
coastline. They can also be applied to modeling Time-‐Series, gauging the forces of
dependence and creating more accurate models than those generated by a true
Random Walk Model. This analysis can be applied to the persistence of floods, or to
the future movements of financial assets on the stock market. Fractals allow us to
examine complex chaotic systems in their full intricacy. Rather than wildly
simplifying our calculations to fit the standard tools of mathematics, Fractals allow
us to more accurately represent the reality of a system, allowing us to adapt our
models to reality, rather than adapting reality to our models.
11 Worapot Ongkrutaraksa is lecturer of finance at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Australia, where he teaches financial statements analysis and financial modeling (Ongkrutaraksa).
Benjamin Weimer 35
The Fractal Market Hypothesis In order to understand the Fractal Market Hypothesis, one must first
examine the how and why of markets? How do markets function and why do they
form? The first is pretty simple, markets form so that the individual participants or
investors can openly trade and exchange stocks. But why do we really need
markets? Individuals could still trade stocks without the NASDAQ or the NYSE, but
no one would know how much a stock was truly worth, and, more importantly, if
you wanted to sell an asset, you would not always be able to find a buyer. Inversely,
if you wanted to buy an asset you would not always be able to find a seller. What
markets do is create a liquid selling environment. They create an environment
where a buyer can find a seller and vice versa (Peters 39).
Liquidity is immensely important to the functioning of markets as it ensures
that stocks can be traded efficiently. Liquidity guarantees that investors with
different investment horizons are able to trade seamlessly with each other and that
they are able to get as close to a fair price as possible (Peters 41). In fact, stocks with
high liquidity, meaning stocks that are trading frequently and in high volumes, often
perfectly mirror the estimated value and profitability of the company whose asset it
represents. Market ‘anomalies’ such as panics and stampedes occur during times of
low-‐liquidity. This means that there is an imbalance between the buyers and the
sellers. When there are more buyers than sellers, supply and demand dictates that
the price will rise, and inversely, if there are more sellers, the price will fall. The
worst market crashes throughout history have been caused by this imbalance, a
Benjamin Weimer 36
large volume of individuals wish to sell an asset while no one is buying it back
(Peters 42).
Oddly, the Efficient Market Hypothesis mentions nothing of liquidity. It
simply says that prices are always fair in times of both high and low liquidity. As a
result this theory is unable to explain stampedes and crashes, the very behavior that
defines the market. The problem with this view as Edgar Peters12 noted is that,
“when lack of liquidity strikes, participating investors are willing to take any price
they can, fair or not” (42). It is essential for a capital market model to account for
liquidity because markets are not always stable; they do not always possess that
high liquidity which is assumed in the Efficient Market Model.
Liquidity in the markets is caused by investors with different investment
horizons. Not all investors have the same time scale; a pension fund may have an
investment horizon of twenty years while a day trader at his laptop may only be in
the market for five or ten minutes. It is important to note that not all investors are
homogenous. Peters noted that “some traders must trade and generate profits every
day. Some are trading to meet liabilities that will not be realized until years in the
future. Some are highly leveraged. Some are capitalized” (42). Because each investor
is different, they have different goals and, as a result, they each value information
differently. The day trader will look primarily at the ticker data and the charts,
looking for minute trends and small changes. For him, the goal is to make the buy at
the daily low and to sell at the daily high. A pension fund on the other hand is not as 12 Edgar Peters is a Senior Manager of Systematic Asset Allocation for PanAgora Asset Management Inc. He is also the author of Chaos and Order in the Capital Markets and Fractal Market Analysis. These books are two of the most influential books on the subject of Chaos Theory and the Fractal Market Hypothesis (Peters).
Benjamin Weimer 37
concerned about the tiny fluctuation. They would instead use economic indicators,
earnings reports, tax returns, and studies of the economy as a whole. Each investor
values his own brand of information, uniquely suited to his personal goals and
investment objectives (Peters 46).
In 1992, the mean price change for a five-‐minute period on the Dow Jones
Average was -‐.000284 percent with a standard deviation of .05976 percent (Peters
42). If a five standard deviation drop occurred or a loss of .298516 percent occurred,
the investor with a five-‐minute investment horizon would be at a loss and if this
continued, he would be ruined. A more long-‐term investor with a weeklong
investment horizon might consider this drop a buying opportunity. For this investor,
the mean change is .22 percent with a standard deviation of 2.37 percent13. For this
investor, that change is insignificant, but also presents an opportunity as he has
sufficient time to recover. For an investor with an even longer horizon, this event
may not even register as noteworthy (Weron 289).
Liquidity is created because as our five-‐minute day trader panics over his
loss, the weekly investor can swoop in and buy his shares because the weekly
investor values the information differently. To them, this is not a major change; it is
simply a routine fluctuation. Weron14 wrote that
When all investors with different horizons are trading simultaneously the market is stable. The stability of the markets relies not only on a random diversification of the investment horizons of the participants
13 Based on data gathered over a ten year period from 1983 to 1993 (Peters) 14 Rafael Weron is an economics professor and senior lecturer at the Wroclaw University of Technology. He has done extensive research in the fields of operations research and agent-‐based modeling (Weron)
Benjamin Weimer 38
but also on the fact that the different horizons value the importance of the information flow differently (292).
The structure of the market is considered fractal because it exhibits the self-‐
similarity discussed previously. Different investment horizons all exist on different
scales, yet they are nearly identical to each other. This is shown visually in Appendix
A. For each time horizon, the distributions of the magnitudes of price changes are
roughly identical. Certainly, they do not strictly adhere to the Levy-‐stable
distribution, but they are remarkably close (Blackledge 12). Birau stated that this
concept “is not a rootless abstraction but a theoretical reformulation of a down-‐to-‐
earth bit of market folklore – namely that movements of markets all look alike when
a market is enlarged or reduced so that it fits the same time and price scale” (1531).
Birau made the simple observation that price charts when stripped of their scale
and title all look identical. It is nearly impossible to tell the difference between a
chart of today’s fluctuation and a chart for the last ten years of movement. This is
called scale invariance; regardless of the scale, the market still exhibits the same
chaotic structure (Birau 1531).
This fractal nature is vastly important to how markets function. The
variances in the investment horizons are what creates the liquidity. A major event
on a short time horizon is contained because the investors on a longer horizon are
able to purchase the asset, creating liquidity and restoring order to the market. This
fractal structure is what maintains the stability of the market. Weron noted
“instability occurs when the market loses its fractal structure and assumes a fairly
uniform investment horizon” (291). This is what causes market crashes, the most
Benjamin Weimer 39
common cause of which are periods of economic or political crisis during which “the
long-‐term outlook becomes highly uncertain” (Peters 46). During these periods, the
information important to short-‐term investors and day-‐traders is the same as what
is important to banks and pension funds. These long-‐term investors are forced to
rely on this short-‐term information because the long-‐term outlook is unknown.
They are forced to utilize the only information available to them, and often that is
minute-‐by-‐minute data fueled largely by rumor and speculation. When the fractal
structure collapses into a single time horizon, there is no more liquidity. With
everyone trading with the same information, they are all valuing the stock using the
same criteria; all selling at the same time without an investor with a longer time
horizon to step in and buy in order to restore order (Peters 48).
Another result of the fractal structure is a phenomenon known as global
determinism and local randomness. In the case of a natural fractal object such as a
tree, we can see that each branch is a scaled down representation of the whole, and
each smaller branch is similar to the larger branches, and the twigs are similar to
these branches. Yet unlike a mathematical fractal such as the ones on page 31, the
smaller components are not perfect representations of the whole. This is because
they are subject to random variation. There are uncontrollable factors that dictate
the shape of each branch, yet the whole remains the same. Christmas trees in
particular are all roughly the same shape and a young child will often draw one by
placing a large triangle on top of a smaller rectangle. This is roughly the shape of the
real thing, yet the branches and leaves of every tree are unique; each one is
different, yet as a whole each one displays the same general shape and orientation.
Benjamin Weimer 40
The same concept applies in the context of financial markets. On a smaller
time-‐horizon, technical analysis reigns supreme. Investors examine charts, following
these patterns and following other investors. As a result, for these shorter time
horizons, technical factors and liquidity become vastly important and crowd
behavior dominates. As the investment horizon grows, these factors become less
important and are replaced by fundamental and economic factors, such as earnings
reports and the state of the economy. Thus, as the time-‐horizons extend outward,
the market becomes more deterministic, no longer dominated by irrational crowd-‐
behavior, but rather “rising and falling as earnings rise and fall” (Peters 48).
The fractal structure of various investment horizons means that information
is not immediately incorporated into an asset’s value as the Efficient Market
Hypothesis purports, but rather information is assimilated differently on different
investment horizons. Individuals value information differently and thus different
individuals may incorporate the same information in different ways. Markets are
not in equilibrium like the Efficient Market Hypothesis would have you believe, but
rather they are complex and constantly evolving systems. They are not comprised of
a cloned rational investor, but rather composed of a heterogeneous mixture of long-‐
term and short-‐term investors (Weron 291). They are not always liquid, but rather
liquidity is a variable that itself can change. The Fractal Market Hypothesis is a
model of Capital Markets that can describe financial markets in their observable
form rather than simplifying the markets to fit our models. The fractal structure is
vividly apparent upon an in depth analysis of observable market behavior, and is
essential to how markets function. The Fractal Market Hypothesis is a model that
Benjamin Weimer 41
allows us to generate tools to truly describe markets, not to describe abstractions of
markets, which is all the Efficient Market Hypothesis is capable of doing.
Conclusion
The Fractal Market Hypothesis uses the attributes of physical fractals such as
self-‐similarity and scale invariance to model our financial markets as we see them.
Today’s flawed and outdated model of finance is long past overdue for a
replacement. The Efficient Market Hypothesis was the pinnacle of its day, but that
day has long since passed. The Fractal Market Hypothesis with its ability to account
for changes in liquidity and to understand the market at times of non-‐equilibrium is
the model of the future. The Fractal Market Hypothesis is not widely used today
because the computations are complex and the added intricacy is largely
unnecessary on your average trading day. But our world has become more
connected, a terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia can shake the world’s commodity
markets or a strike in Detroit can cause the stock market to falter. We live in an age
of growing uncertainty, an age where political turmoil and economic upheaval are
common place. In this age of interconnectedness and crisis, market ‘anomalies’ are
becoming more and more common. The tails of the Bell Curve are growing fatter.
With this constant threat of crisis and defeat, the financial community needs
a model that can account for this turbulence in the market. Bankers need a model
that will allow them to make short-‐term and long-‐term decisions, economists need a
model that truly explains and represents the markets, and government regulators
need a model that will allow them to understand the interactions between different
Benjamin Weimer 42
investors so that they can predict and mitigate crashes and financial disasters. The
Fractal Market Hypothesis is the basis for that model. The Fractal Market
Hypothesis is a theoretical framework upon which a new generation of tools will be
created. Today, very few investors use these tools, yet the supply is growing.
Researchers such as Didier Sornette15 have crafted equations capable of predicting
crashes before they happen. Jonathon Blackledge and his associates have created a
tool to trade currencies based on a fractal approach16 and Edgar Peters has
published code that allows anyone to find the fractal characteristics of a financial
time series17. Fractals are the future of finance.
As technology advances and computers become quantum and we create
networks capable of mimicking human thought, our economic models have
stagnated. In the 1950’s, the Efficient Market Hypothesis brought with it a
revolution. It is time for our financial models to mirror our real financial system and
the Fractal Market Hypothesis is the model that will do just that. Another revolution
is coming to finance, one fueled by chaos and driven by fractal geometry.
15 Why Stock Markets Crash: Critical Events in Complex Financial Systems by Didier Sornette 16 “Currency Trading Using the Fractal Market Hypothesis” by Jonathan Blackledge and Kieran Murphy 17 Rescaled Range Analysis or R/S Analysis in Fractal Market Analysis
Benjamin Weimer 43
Appendix A: Frequency of Fluctuations on Different Investment Horizons based on Standard Deviation
Benjamin Weimer 46
Annotated Bibliography
Armstrong, Seiji, Huy Luong, Alon Arad, and Kane Hill. "Fractal Financial Market Analysis." Fractal Financial Market Analysis. The Australian National University, Canberra. Lecture.
This source is the transcript of a brief presentation given at The Australian National
University. The presentation gives a very brief introduction to the history of Fractal Market Analysis in addition to variety equations that are used to analyze large data sets mathematically. This source provided Insight into the more technical side of FMH and will be immensely useful in gaining more insight into the technicalities of FMH. The equations detailed in this lecture are elaborately explained and largely simplified from other technical sources out there. Arthur, Brian A. "Complexity Economics: A Different Framework for Economic Thought." SFI Working Paper 43.4 (2013). Print. This source explores the applications of complexity theory to economic analysis Through the use of agent based modeling, Arthur attempts to simulate a market system and shows that even in the form of his simplifies market models, fractal patterns emerge. This paper is from the Santa Fe Institute, the world’s foremost research think tank on Complexity and Chaos Theories. This paper will be important in exploring the significance of complexity theory to economic thought broadly and will be used extensively throughout my paper.. Bachelier, Louis. "The Theory of Speculation." Thesis. University of Paris, 1900.
Print.
This is the original thesis published by Louis Bachelier that outlines the very basis for the Efficient Market Hypothesis. This thesis goes in depth on the specifics of the early efficient theory including the proofs for a Gaussian distribution and all of Bachelier’s original observation regarding the French bond markets. This source will be immensely important in the early stages of the paper as I attempt to provide historical context behind the evolution of the theories. Bernstein, Peter L. Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street. New
York: John Wiley & Sons, 2005. Print. This book provides an in-‐depth history of modern financial theory from Bachelier to our current day financial theories. This book details the research of Bachelier,
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Samuelson, Markowitz, Paulson and Fama. This book explains how the theories have evolved over time, integrating eclectic and disparate fields of study into the comprehensive theory of capital markets. This source will be used extensively in the beginning of the paper detailing the evolution throughout time of the theories. Birau, Felicia R. "The Fractal Market Hypothesis." Diss. U of Craiova, 2010.
Challenges of the Knowledge Society, Economics (2010): 1530-‐533. Print.
This source is a working paper published by a post-‐graduate researcher at the University of Craiova which provides a detailed description of FMH and an in depth analysis of its underlying assumptions and advantages compared with EMH. This source provides a technical overview of FMH, and begins to explore the complex mathematical concepts underlying the model. Blackledge, Jonthan. "Financial Modelling Using the Fractal Market Hypothesis."
European Union Economic Summit. Dublin. 5 Mar. 2010. Lecture.
This source is another lecture given by Jonathan Blackledge at the European Union Economic Summit. Blackledge is considered by many to be the world’s leading expert in Fractal Finance today. This presentation is an immensely detailed mathematical description of FMH that includes all of the Fractal equations for various styles of analysis. Furthermore, Blackledge explains many of the stranger mathematical phenomena in an easily understood format. Blackledge, Jonathan. The Fractal Market Hypothesis: Applications to Financial
Forecasting. Warsaw: Centre for Advanced Studies, 2010. Print. This source is a working paper published by Blackledge, one of the preeminent researchers in the FMH field, It explores in-‐depth the entirety of the FMH model from its underlying assumptions to empirical data to the mathematical derivation of the model itself. This source provides one of the most in-‐depth descriptions of FMH, how it works, how its derived and how it can employed in the context of the option derivative markets. Fama, Eugene F. "Efficient Capital Markets: A Review of Theory and Empirical
Work." The Journal of Finance 25.2 (1970): 383-‐417. Jstor. Web. 4 Oct. 2014.
Eugene Fama is considered to be the father of the Efficient Market Hypothesis. His
work was instrumental in uniting the research that came before him into one grand
Benjamin Weimer 48
and unified theory. This paper is one of his later reflections on the basis of and evidence for the Efficient Market Hypothesis. In this paper, Fama attempts to bring together all of his past research along with that of his predecessors to lay out what exactly is the Efficient Market Hypothesis. This source is used extensively in discussing the evolution and assumptions of the Efficient Market Hypothesis. Farmer, J. Doyne. "Toward Agent-‐Based Models for Investment." AIMR Conference
Proceedings 2001.7 (2001): 61-‐71. Print. This source is a paper written by Doyne Farmer, the founder of the Prediction Company, one of the most advanced Fractal Based Investment firms in the world. Farmer explores the applications of Fractal Agent Based Modeling for Stock Market Analysis. Agent-‐Based Modeling is a tool used to understand complex interactions within ecosystems by creating individual participants based on varying parameters and studying how they interact within the model. According to Farmer, his work with Financial Agent Based Models has provided support for the basic tenants of FMH and has refuted much of EMH by essentially precluding the existence of a market equilibrium point. Goel, Akshat. Distribution Comparison. Digital image. Fractal Finance: A Rogue
Mathematician’s Search for Answers. Triplehelixblog.com, 9 Apr. 2012. Web.
This was a source I read early on in order to gain a basic understanding of the Dynamics of the Fractal Market Hypothesis. This is a blog post that attempts to explain Fractal Finance in Laymen’s terms and does so brilliantly. In the paper, I didn’t cite this article because it was simply a jumping off point for discovering much of the more detailed works I explicitly cited. I did use this source in the final paper to source the comparison graphic of the Levy-‐stable distribution versus the Normal Distribution Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a New Science. New York, NY, U.S.A.: Penguin, 1988.
Print. This book is often considered to be the definitive book on Chaos Theory. It is largely an introduction to the concepts, dynamics and applications of Chaos Theory. This book was extremely important in the section discussing Chaos Theory and as a result is cited extensively. Chaos Theory is the conceptual foundation upon which fractals are built and as a result is integral to understanding the implications of the Fractal Market Hypothesis. Chaos is often mis-‐perceived as a wildly random and
Benjamin Weimer 49
confused state, this book helps to differentiate between randomness and chaos, especially in the context of Financial Markets. Hung, Jane. Betting with the Kelly Criterion. Working paper. 2010. Print. In this paper, Jane Hung explores the various applications of the Kelly Betting Criterion to Quantitative Finance. The Kelly Criterion is a mathematical formula for calculating the percentage of your capital to bet based on the perceived odds of winning. This betting strategy was first employed in finance by Ed Thorp and was later also used in his Blackjack card-‐counting strategy. Understanding the derivation of the Kelly Criterion is essential to understanding the applications of Statistical Arbitrage within the context of EMH. Imdadullah, Muhammad. "Time Series Analysis and Forecasting." Basic Statistics and
Data Analysis. N.p., 27 Dec. 2013. Web. 09 Apr. 2015. This article is a basic introduction to Time-‐series in the context of Finance. This source provides a brief statistical overview regarding the workings and uses of Time-‐series and Time-‐series analysis. In the final thesis, this source is only used to provide a definition of Time-‐series in a footnote in order to explain the concept of Fractal Time. Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. London: Penguin, 2012. Print. Thinking Fast and Slow is a psychology book by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman. In this book he details his decades of research in areas such as prospect theory, decision theory and the two system model of human thought. Daniel Kahneman is considered by many to be the founder of behavioral finance. Many of the psychological phenomena described in the book undercut the basic rationality assumption of EMH such as the anchoring effect and the endowment effect. This book provides a barrage of psychological ammunition to diminish the integrity of EMH. Kendall, Maurice G. "The Analysis of Economic Time-‐Series, Part 1: Prices." Journal
of the Royal Statistical Society 96 (1953): 11-‐25. Print. This is a statistical analysis article that describes the random character of markets. This article is noteworthy because it is one of the first articles to examine financial indices as Time-‐series. This paved the way for many later articles and studies using the same methodology. This article is quoted in discussing the Efficient Market
Benjamin Weimer 50
Hypothesis because Kendall’s work was some of the first empirical work to show the randomness of markets and is widely cited in discussions of Efficient Market Theory and its evolution. Kurzweil, Ray. How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed. New
York, NY: Penguin, 2013. Print. This book is not related to finance; however, it describes the emerging science of behavioral computing and describes how Neural Networks function. A Neural Network is a computer system that harnesses the power of parallel processing to deliver unparalleled performance. This kind of computer system is immensely fast and capable of performing multiple computing tasks simultaneously. Neural Networks will be essential to make Fractal Market Analysis more practical as the required calculations require immense computing power. Lo, Andrew W., and Craig A. MacKinlay. A Non-‐random Walk down Wall Street.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1999. Print. This paper discusses a statistical technique used to calculate short-‐term serial correlations in the market. Essentially, this paper provides evidence that the markets are not as random as once believed. This is utilized in my paper as it highlights a major chink in the armor of the Efficient market Hypothesis. Lo, Andrew W., Harry Mamaysky, and Jiang Wang. "Foundations of Technical
Analysis: Computational Algorithms, Statistical Inference, and Empirical Implementation." The Journal of Finance 55.4 (2000): 1705-‐770. Print.
This is a second paper that details statistical methods used to show short and long-‐term dependence in the market. This source corroborates the information provided in the previous article by Lo and Mckinley, strengthening the critique of the Efficient Market Hypothesis. Loeb, Gerald M. The Battle for Investment Survival. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1965. Print. This source is an early book about investing written before the widespread acceptance of the Efficient Market Hypothesis. Loeb describes an investment philosophy in which an investor places huge amounts of money into a single asset that they can know a lot about. This is used to provide a contrasting view to
Benjamin Weimer 51
Efficient Market Theory which stresses the need to diversify ones portfolio in order to manage and control overall risk. Malkiel, B., “The Efficient Market Hypothesis and Its Critics”, Princeton University,
CEPS Working Paper No. 91, 2003 This source is a survey of historical research on the topic of the Efficient Market Hypothesis. Malkiel presents all the arguments for the Efficient Market as well as a survey of the evidence against this theory. I use this source extensively as Malkiel details numerous arguments against the Efficient Market as well as introduces the authors and researchers behind each of these theories. Mandelbrot, Benoit B. "How Fractals Can Explain What's Wrong with Wall Street."
Scientific American (1999). Print.
This article in Scientific American was a kind of Manifesto for Mandelbrot in which he laid down the beginnings of his Fractal Finance Theory. This article was originally published in 1987 right on the heels of the Black Monday debacle. Mandelbrot points out the various flaws in the current system, which allowed such a dramatic market meltdown to occur. Mandelbrot describes the fundamental flaws in Modern Portfolio Theory that prevented risk management tools from accounting for the kind of precipitous drop that occurred on Black Monday. Mandelbrot, Benoit B., and Richard L. Hudson. The (mis)behavior of Markets: A
Fractal View of Risk, Ruin, and Reward. New York: Published by Basic, 2004. Print
This book written by Benoit Mandelbrot was his first study of the applications of Fractal Geometry to refute the tenants of Modern Financial Theory. In this book, Mandelbrot outlines the essential flaws in EMH with exceedingly compelling evidence. He then explains how a fractal model can fill these empirical voids and the many implications a multi-‐fractal model would have on our financial system. The format and information presented in this book mirrors the intended layout of my thesis although is written for a different target audience. Markowitz, Hary M. "Portfolio Selection." Journal of Finance VII.1 (1952): 77-‐91.
Print. This is another groundbreaking paper that contributed to the Efficient Market Hypothesis. This was the first paper to propose investing in portfolios rather than
Benjamin Weimer 52
individual assets which led to the development of more robust economic and investment theories. Additionally, this paper contributed to the Efficient Market Hypothesis by offering equations that can be used to calculate covariance between stocks. This is essentially the extent to which the prices of the two assets are connected. This was later developed into a central tenant of the Efficient Market Hypothesis. Metz, Tim, Alan Murray, Thomas E. Ricks, and Beatrice E. Garcia. "The Crash of '87:
Stocks Plummet 508 Amid Panicky Selling." The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones & Company, 20 Oct. 1987. Web. 04 Oct. 2014.
This source is a newspaper article from the week immediately following the 1987 crash, which explains the events surrounding the crash, and provides specific details of the crash itself such as percentage losses and point deficits. This data will be important as the 1987 crash is a definitive piece of evidence against EMH, and this article sheds light on the events surrounding said crash. Ongkrutaraksa, Worapot. "Fractal Theory and Neural Networks in Capital Markets."
Research Working Paper: Kent State University (1995). Print. This working paper by Worapot Ongkrutaraska explores the applications of Neural Networks to process Fractal Models for Financial Analysis. Neural Networks are computer systems that utilize parallel processing in an attempt to mirror neuronal connections within the human brain. Ongkrutaraska finds that computing capabilities of Neural Networks partnered with the modern science of machine learning create a very powerful tool for financial analysis. Ongkrutaraksa, Worapot. "Financial Economic Papers." Oocities.org. N.p., n.d. Web. 9
Apr. 2015.
This source is the personal website of Worapot Ongkrutaraksa. I use this source only to gain a little biographical information about the research in order to provide greater context for his work. This source is only used once throughout the work in a footnote providing detail on Ongkrutaraksa’s past and research. Osbourne, M. F. M. "Brownian Motion in the Stock Market." Operations Research VII
(1959): 145-‐73. Print.
This is the original journal article in which M.F.M Osbourne published his research about fiancnial markets. In this paper, the first connections are drawn between
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Brownian motion and financial time-‐series. This became extremely influential as the concept of Brownian motion became a central tenant of later efficient market literature. This source is used to discuss the evolution of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, as it is one of the groundbreaking papers on the subject. Patterson, Scott. The Quants: How a Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street
and Nearly Destroyed It. New York: Random House, 2010. Print.
This source is a book written by a Wall Street Journal reporter who attempts to explore the history of quantitative finance in a way that people without finance degrees can understand while also exploring the role that financial engineers played in the more recent market crashes. This book provides a good deal of background information and context to understand the principles and assumptions of EMH and FMH, and it provides a useful history of the field, highlighting significant works. Peters, Edgar E. Fractal Market Analysis: Applying Chaos Theory to Investment and
Economics. New York: J. Wiley & Sons, 1994. Print. This book is one of the most influential works on the subject of the Fractal Market Hypothesis. It provides an in-‐depth discussion of the Hypothesis as well as a myriad of techniques and strategies to apply Fractal Analysis. In the paper, I heavily utilize the information regarding the Fractal Market Hypothesis. The author lays out the various characteristics and assumptions of the hypothesis in a very straightforward and succinct manner, which is similar to the manner I lay out my argument in this paper. Applications of the theory fall outside of the scope of this paper and thus were omitted. Samuelson, Paul A. The Collected Scientific Papers of Paul A. Samuelson. Cambridge,
MA: M.I.T., 1966. Print.
This source is an anthology of works by Paul Samuelson, which includes a myriad of papers and some of his most influential books. Samuelson was instrumental in developing the Efficient Market Hypothesis, as he was one of the first researchers on the subject who was able to reach a widespread audience. Additionally, Samuelson helped to develop the theory of informational incorporation by exploring the connection between an assets price and its inherent value. This source is used extensively in exploring the history and evolution of the Efficient Market Hypothesis. Smith, Leonard A. Chaos: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Print.
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This book is a very brief introduction to the theory of Chaos. It presents chaos theory and its partner theory of complexity in a concise and easily understood manner. The source is a brilliant overview of the forces at play in a chaotic system and describes in detail the characteristics and principles that govern chaos. This source was extremely useful to me as I attempted to outline the basic structures of chaos in the context of Fractal Market Theory. Wallace, David Foster. Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity. New York: Atlas Book, 2003. Print.
This book by David Foster Wallace is a brief history of and critical examination of the modern concept of infinity. It explores how our current concept has evolved since the time of Plato and Aristotle based on the works of Zeno and Cantor. It also explores the principles of Number Theory, which allow this modern concept to be derived. This source is used early on in the paper in a footnote that provides a little biographical information about a 19th century mathematician named Poincare.
Weatherall, James Owen. The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable. Boston: Mariner, 2014. Print.
This source is a book that attempts to explore the history of Quantitative Finance from its conception in the late 1800’s. Unlike Patterson’s book, this source focuses more on chaos based models, most notably FMH and other chaotic models which employ fat-‐tailed distribution. This book serves to provide a great deal of background information and context, while also providing a simplification of FMH and other complex models which is useful for explaining to an audience without a working knowledge in finance. Weron, Aleksander, and Rafal Weron. "Fractal Market Hypothesis and the Two
Power-‐laws." Chaos, Solitons, and Fractals 11 (2000): 289-‐96. Print. This source is a working paper written by Aleksander and Rafal Weron that explores the implications of FMH on Time-‐series analysis. Using normal statistical tools, time is intended to be viewed as linear; however, with a multi-‐fractal model, time is no longer perceived to be linear. Instead, time is more elastic, speeding up in times of high-‐volatility and slowing down when volatility is low. This paper explores the implications of this intuitive assumption and how it is able to more accurately account for perceived market activity.
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Williams, R. Tee. "Efficiency and the Fractal Market Hypothesis." Personal interview. 18 Nov. 2014.
Mr. Williams was my thesis advisor through the writing of this paper. During this interview he provided guidance in designing and fleshing out my topic as well as finding other research and tools. This interview is not directly cited in the body of my thesis, yet many of the resources found with the help of Mr. Williams are cited and used extensively throughout the work.
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Economics by Edgar Peters