financial phi

How Fractals Can Explain What's Wrong with Wall Street: Scientific American

Editor's Note: This story was originally published in the February 1999 edition of Scientific American. We are posting it in light of recent news involving Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch.

Individual investors and professional stock and currency traders know better than ever that prices quoted in any financial market often change with heart-stopping swiftness. Fortunes are made and lost in sudden bursts of activity when the market seems to speed up and the volatility soars. Last September, for instance, the stock for Alcatel, a French telecommunications equipment manufacturer, dropped about 40 percent one day and fell another 6 percent over the next few days. In a reversal, the stock shot up 10 percent on the fourth day.

The classical financial models used for most of this century predict that such precipitous events should never happen. A cornerstone of finance is modern portfolio theory, which tries to maximize returns for a given level of risk. The mathematics underlying portfolio theory handles extreme situations with benign neglect: it regards large market shifts as too unlikely to matter or as impossible to take into account. It is true that portfolio theory may account for what occurs 95 percent of the time in the market. But the picture it presents does not reflect reality, if one agrees that major events are part of the remaining 5 percent. An inescapable analogy is that of a sailor at sea. If the weather is moderate 95 percent of the time, can the mariner afford to ignore the possibility of a typhoon?

The risk-reducing formulas behind portfolio theory rely on a number of demanding and ultimately unfounded premises. First, they suggest that price changes are statistically independent of one another: for example, that today’s price has no influence on the changes between the current price and tomorrow’s. As a result, predictions of future market movements become impossible. The second presumption is that all price changes are distributed in a pattern that conforms to the standard bell curve. The width of the bell shape (as measured by its sigma, or standard deviation) depicts how far price changes diverge from the mean; events at the extremes are considered extremely rare. Typhoons are, in effect, defined out of existence.

Do financial data neatly conform to such assumptions? Of course, they never do. Charts of stock or currency changes over time do reveal a constant background of small up and down price movements—but not as uniform as one would expect if price changes fit the bell curve. These patterns, however, constitute only one aspect of the graph. A substantial number of sudden large changes—spikes on the chart that shoot up and down as with the Alcatel stock—stand out from the background of more moderate perturbations. Moreover, the magnitude of price movements (both large and small) may remain roughly constant for a year, and then suddenly the variability may increase for an extended period. Big price jumps become more common as the turbulence of the market grows—clusters of them appear on the chart.

According to portfolio theory, the probability of these large fluctuations would be a few millionths of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth. (The fluctuations are greater than 10 standard deviations.) But in fact, one observes spikes on a regular basis—as often as every month—and their probability amounts to a few hundredths. Granted, the bell curve is often described as normal—or, more precisely, as the normal distribution. But should financial markets then be described as abnormal? Of course not—they are what they are, and it is portfolio theory that is flawed.

Modern portfolio theory poses a danger to those who believe in it too strongly and is a powerful challenge for the theoretician. Though sometimes acknowledging faults in the present body of thinking, its adherents suggest that no other premises can be handled through mathematical modeling. This contention leads to the question of whether a rigorous quantitative description of at least some features of major financial upheavals can be developed. The bearish answer is that large market swings are anomalies, individual “acts of God” that present no conceivable regularity. Revisionists correct the questionable premises of modern portfolio theory through small fixes that lack any guiding principle and do not improve matters sufficiently. My own work—carried out over many years— takes a very different and decidedly bullish position.