The Predictors - by Thomas A Bass (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Excerpted in The New Yorker and hailed by the business press, The Predictors is destined to become a classic of its generation--an antic, subversive odyssey into a universe defined by the mystical convergence of physics and finance.

How could a couple of rumpled physicists in sandals and Eat-the-Rich T-shirts, piling computers into an adobe house in Santa Fe, hope to take on the masters of the universe from Morgan Stanley? Doyne Farmer and Norman Packard may never have read The Wall Street Journal, but they happen to be among the founders of the new sciences of chaos and complexity. Who better to try to find order in the apparently unreasoned chaos of the global financial markets? Thomas A. Bass takes us inside their start-up company, following it from its inception as a motley collection of longhaired Ph.D.s to its passage into the centers of financial power, where "the predictors" find investors and finally go live with real money. The Predictors is a dizzying, often hilarious tale of genius and greed.

Review Quotes

"His narrative [teaches] readers about chaos theory as it relates to economics, about the increasingly recondite instruments of investment in the age of derivatives and, perhaps most important, about the evolution of financial markets toward automation." --The New York Times

"One of the best books ever written about commodities, currency and derivatives trading." --David Lazarus, San Francisco Chronicle

About the Author

Thomas A. Bass is the author of The Eudaemonic Pie and several other books. He writes for Wired, The New Yorker, and many other magazines. He lives in Clinton, New York.