The Predictors: How a Band of Maverick Physicists Used Chaos Theory to Trade Their Way to a Fortune on Wall Street - Hardcover

Long esteemed in the scientific community, Farmer and Packard have become legendary in hacker circles since their failed attempt to beat the roulette tables in Las Vegas with toe-operated computers was chronicled in Bass's well-regarded 1985 book called The Eudaemonic Pie. This time, though, the two hit the jackpot with their cutting-edge computer programs and the company they created to trade German marks, Chicago commodities, Japanese treasury bonds, Texas oil futures, and New York securities. Bass's prose is a bit flowery at times, but his perceptive you-are-there account is nonetheless entertaining and sure to cement the pair's reputation as today's ultimate masters of "phynance," the successful, and now oft-copied, merger of physics and finance. --Howard Rothman

In this deceptively simple question lay the roots of a great adventure in the world of money, an antic, frantic odyssey into a universe defined by the mystical convergence of physics and finance.

It never dawned on Doyne Farmer and Norman Packard--not when growing up together in the Southwest, not during their hippie grad-school days, not even when applying their collective genius in physics and mathematics to winning at roulette in Las Vegas--that someday they would end up as players, beating the Masters of the Universe from Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs at their own game. But of course it's only natural that these accomplished theorists, counted among the founders of the new science of chaos, would eventually turn their attention to what may be the most uncontrolled and chaotic phenomena of all--the global financial markets.

The Predictors is Thomas Bass's engrossing and often hilarious chronicle of how these two scientists--along with their team of T-shirted and ponytailed Ph.D.'s, and with the help of some very savvy financial gurus-attempted to decode and model the complex patterns underlying the apparently random movements of commodities, currency, and equities markets. On the dizzying ride from the Prediction Company's dusty offices above a Santa Fe fortune-teller to the glittering towers of Wall Street, Farmer and Packard find themselves in the company of virtually every cowboy trader and rogue millionaire who ever tackled the market. Bass brilliantly spins a tale of genius and greed, power brokers and rebels, all the while providing a brisk education in chaos, complexity, and the world financial markets.

For anyone who has ever dreamed of finding a way to outguess the wizards of Wall Street, The Predictors will be a ride as thrilling as a big market surge