The Misbehavior of Markets

A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence

By: Benoit Mandelbrot, Richard L. Hudson

Narrated by: Jason Olazabal

Benoit B. Mandelbrot, one of the century’s most influential mathematicians, is world-famous for making mathematical sense of a fact everybody knows but that geometers from Euclid on down had never assimilated: Clouds are not round, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not smooth. To these classic lines we can now add another example: Markets are not the safe bet your broker may claim.

In his first book for a general audience, Mandelbrot, with co-author Richard L. Hudson, shows how the dominant way of thinking about the behavior of markets-a set of mathematical assumptions a century old and still learned by every MBA and financier in the world-simply does not work. As he did for the physical world in his classic The Fractal Geometry of Nature, Mandelbrot here uses fractal geometry to propose a new, more accurate way of describing market behavior. The complex gyrations of IBM’s stock price and the dollar-euro exchange rate can now be reduced to straightforward formulae that yield a far better model of how risky they are.

With his fractal tools, Mandelbrot has gotten to the bottom of how financial markets really work, and in doing so, he describes the volatile, dangerous (and strangely beautiful) properties that financial experts have never before accounted for. The result is no less than the foundation for a new science of finance.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2007 Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard L. Hudson (P)2019 Hachette Audio

amazing work

great book for all players in the financial world, esp money managers. unique insight into risks and risk management

One of the best books i’ve ever read on markets

This book should be required reading for anyone interested in investing, markets, or finance. Basic familiarity with options and mathematics is extremely helpful and understanding this book, but it is overall quite approachable.

very fascinating, but hard to apply

definitely got me thinking but not very clear takeaways to apply to trading/investing for the average investor

Where are the PDF?

Very very good but where are the PDFs? The book is very interesting fractal vs bell curve.

The book's good ideas outweigh the bad.

Interesting discussions of price distributions, path dependency, fractals, and market risk. Marred by poor copy editing (it's "Chicago Board Options Exchange") and the reader's mipronunciations of non-English names and terms. The authors' conclusion, in which they express hope that more-enlightened academic research into market behavior will make the world a better place, is naive but doesn't much detract from the better ideas in the book.

Enjoyable Story

Mandelbrot tells a good story about how his revolutionary ideas undermine conventional wisdom. More than likely your retirement plans are built on an unstable foundation, based on his ideas. I think he is right, I just don’t know how to take this information and improve my situation.

The audio quality is good except where it isn’t there are a handful of places where they recorded over corrections that were done poorly.

The PDF is poor quality, some pages are illegible. Inexcusable for what I paid for the book.

Great book for investors

Markets are more volatile than they seem. Be careful out there, and try to avoid 50% losses. Watch out for clusters of volatility.

Fantastico

This was Fantastico hooray bravissimo. I am now happysimo . Thank you for reading my review 😄 :-))))))))))))))

not for dumbs

most people who attempt to read this will give up because they are lazy or stupid. that's fine, though, more gains for me.

Tough listen w/o graphs handy

Incredible book but really only for geeks. Don’t expect to learn anything that could add alpha to your investment portfolio