Rhody Trader

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I’ve begun reading The (Mis)Behavior of Markets by Benoit Mandelbrot. It’s a book I got for cheap in a post-holiday sale - along with a whole slew of others - but I’ve only just recently gotten around to it. Mandelbrot is probably most widely know for is funky fractals and their appearance in so-called Mandelbrot sets, and example of which you can see on the book’s cover. However, he has long been a maverick researcher and theorist in economics and finance.

I’ve only gone a little ways in the book, but found a quote most definitely worth sharing. In a paragraph which derides the dogmatism of classic finance, Mandelbrot includes this little gem:

By the late 1980s and 1990s, however, I was no longer the only one seeing those flaws. The financial dislocations convinced many professional financiers that something was wrong. Warren E. Buffett, the famously successful investor and industrialist, jested that he would like to fund univeristy chairs in the Efficient Market Hypothesis, so that the professors would train even more misguided financiers whose money he could win. He called the orthodox theory “foolish” and plain wrong.

I think I’m really going to enjoy this book.

I’ll post a review on my trading education blog when I’m done.

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