The Physics of Finance: Predicting the Unpredictable: How Science Has Taken Over Wall Street
James Owen Weatherall, "The Physics of Finance: Predicting the Unpredictable: How Science Has Taken Over Wall Street"
2014 | ISBN-10: 1780720874 | 304 pages | EPUB | 0,7 MB
2014 | ISBN-10: 1780720874 | 304 pages | EPUB | 0,7 MB
After the economic meltdown of 2008, many pundits placed the blame on the proliferation of complex financial instruments, and on the people who dreamed them up physicists. After all, who could follow the murky workings of their derivatives and quantitative strategies?
In this clear and engaging history of physics and the financial markets, James Owen Weatherall questions this narrative. He takes us on a lively journey from fin-de-siècle Paris to Rat Pack-era Las Vegas, from wartime government labs to Yippie communes, showing how some of the finest scientific minds of the last century came to construct the sophisticated models on which modern securities trading is based.
It was not the physicists who were at fault, argues Weatherall; it was the people who used their ideas and instruments without understanding them. The future for physics in the financial markets should be a constant refining process, where improvements in mathematical modelling are the remedy, not the disease.