Product Description
The latest developments in chaos theory — from an industry expert Chaos and Order in the Capital Markets was the first book to introduce and popularize chaos as it applies to finance. It has since become the classic source on the topic. This new edition is completely updated to include the latest ripples in chaos theory with new chapters that tie in today’s hot innovations, such as fuzzy logic, neural nets, and artificial intelligence. Critical praise fo… More >>
Chaos and Order in the Capital Markets: A New View of Cycles, Prices, and Market Volatility
Tags: artificial intelligence, Capital, capital markets, Chaos, chaos and order, chaos theory, classic source, critical praise, Cycles, fuzzy logic, industry expert, innovations, Market, market volatility, Markets, neural nets, new edition, Order, prices, RIPPLES, VIEW, volatility
#1 by Mr T L Green on February 9, 2010 - 5:43 pm
I have a university maths degree and found the book very obvious and drawn out for the first few chapters. In spite of this I looked forward to what was going to be explained later. Suddenly from a very simple and easy to understand explanation on the EMH he starts to use mathematics in his equations that I had a lot of difficulty following. There was very little or no explanation of how these equations were arrived at and a lot of mathematics and statisics is assumed. This book does not apply the theory in ny meaningful way to the markets let alone the capital markets in my opinion. I found that I took very little away from this book and would not recommend it to anyone who has basic mathematics like myself or is looking for some deeper insight into the markets. I would hate to have Mr Peters as a teacher based on his book.
Rating: 1 / 5
#2 by Jos Pols on February 9, 2010 - 8:07 pm
Nutshell review – 10+ years after reading this book for the first time I still find the material fascinating. It offers an engaging tour through the worlds of random walks, fractals, chaos and nonlinear dynamic systems for the layman. The author’s approach is primarily a conceptual discussion of the topics under review rather than taking a mathematical approach and so it will be accessible to most all readers.
The real message to take away from this book is not whether the markets can be described using fractal geometry or whether the market is a chaotic, nonlinear system. Rather it is that if you are a believer in the efficient market hypothesis, the capital asset pricing model, and the random walk models of market behaviour then you might be in for a nasty surprise.
Other very interesting books in this vein are The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and The (MIS)Behaviour of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin, and Reward by Benoit B. Mandelbrot.
Rating: 4 / 5
#3 by Louis Charbonneau on February 9, 2010 - 9:24 pm
For those of you intrigued by chaos versus the financial markets, I would suggest you get the basic knowledge in Garnett P. Williams “Chaos Theory Tamed” (if you don’t mind being explained in the first twenty chapters things like the laws of exponents and logarithms), or the Devaney books, for people with some maths. By the time you finish these honest, carefully and painstakingly written books, you will have a fair understanding of what chaos theory is about, and you will also see that while it is interesting stuff, it is hard to imagine it having any practical relevance to finance, since finance is the realm of stochastic, not deterministic phenomena.
Mr. Peters’ readers will not have the chance of gaining such a perspective on chaos or on finance, alas. Mr. Peters hasn’t produced a clear, comprehensible text, but rather a imprecise and frustrating piece, presumably written in a very short time, filled with a huge number of graphs having epsilon informational content. It is also full of conceptual mistakes – Mr. Peters most probably doesn’t have a good grasp of what he’s speaking about, but to be fair, it is hard to tell since the implicit message of the book is: “Hey, like I’m going to give out all my secrets…! Forget it, baby!”, so the readers are never given all of the story. Readers therefore have to decide whether they believe that the author has found a meaningful and secret way to use chaos, that unfortunately will not be revealed, or whether the author should be put in the same category as those who write about Crystals or Financial Astrology.
Can smart people make profit with chaos theory? Certainly! However, the only way to do so is by writing books about it…
Profit which seems interesting, since Wiley accepted to publish a second product from Mr. Peters, thereby losing all credibility as an editor of financial books.
Rating: 1 / 5
#4 by K. J. Broekema on February 9, 2010 - 11:24 pm
I read this book, the 1991 version, years ago. Around 1980 my own attempts to crack share prices statistically convinced me that all share prices behaved like a Gaussian random walk meaning that all speculation was comparable with playing roulette and I am not one of those guys who usually wins when gambling. This view was strengthened when the option pricing model came up, meaning that even the real pro’s in the field assume that share prices are nothing but a random walk. This book has opened my eyes to the fact that there is much more to randomness than just the Gaussian curve. Share prices are not fully random. Impressive is the demonstration that an RS analysis on the real data is different when applying the same RS analysis on scrambled data. So there is information hidden in these time series, somewhere. Since then I have picked up the subject of cracking time series again with great pleasure. I think this book is exceptionally well written and without it I doubt if I would have been able to follow Mandelbrot’s book “scaling and fractals in finance” that I bought later. The book is about understanding a subject, not about learning a simple formula to apply on a time series.
Rating: 5 / 5
#5 by Anonymous on February 9, 2010 - 11:35 pm
If you’re looking for a purely conceptual introduction to how chaos theory can be applied to financial markets, this book is as good a source as any. Peters’s discussion of R/S statistics and the graphical examples drawn from the markets are clear and intuitive (Ch. 7-8). The key point demonstrating long-term memory effects in the market is well made.
However he spends an inordinate amount of time attacking the foundations of the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) to the point of being boring, yet the argument boils down to “it has errors when compared to reality”. Duh, so does every other theory, including fractal. The real issue is “for the error in theory A, how bad are the results X, and is theory B much better at it?” If you’re not going to do that, don’t spend 40 pages (Ch. 1-4) on it. This is misleading to those not familiar with EMH, and boring to those who are.
Don’t look to this book for good math. In my edition (1991), careless and erroneous notations abound. Also, the equations are written in BASIC notation which is notoriously hard to visualize, but this is probably the fault of the editor/publisher. Peters makes frequent and unannounced jumps between the apparent rigor of math and loose conjectures. The math is distracting to a qualitative reader, and the conjectures irritating to the quantitative one. Better to cater to one audience, and do it well.
Still, I would recommend this book as a good conceptual introduction to the subject. But if you’re planning to go deeper, use the equations in this book at your own perils. Go to the source.
Rating: 4 / 5