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.
is a dizzying, often hilarious tale of genius and greed.