Preface
1 The moving target
1.1 Invariance principles and laws of nature
1.2 Humanly invented law can always be violated
1.3 Where are we headed?
2 Neo-classical economic theory
2.1 Why study "optimizing behavior"?
2.2 Dissecting neo-classical.economic theory (microeconomics)
2.3 The myth of equilibrium via perfect information
2.4 How many green jackets does a consumer want?
2.5 Macroeconomic lawlessness
2.6 When utility doesn't exist
2.7 Global perspectives in economics
2.8 Local perspectives in physics
3 Probability and stochastic processes
3.1 Elementary rules of probability theory
3.2 The empirical distribution
3.3 Some properties of probability distributions
3.4 Some theoretical distributions
3.5 Lawsof large numbers
3.6 Stochastic processes
3.7 Correlations and stationary processes
4 Scaling the ivory tower of finance
4.1 Prolog
4.2 Horse trading by a fancy name
4.3 Liquidity, and several shaky ideas of "true value"
4.4 The Gambler's Ruin
4.5 The Modigliani-Miller argument
4.6 From Gaussian returns to fat tails
4.7 The best tractable approximation to liquid market dynamics
4.8 "Temporary price equilibria" and other wrong ideas of "equilibrium" in economics and finance
4.9 Searching for Adam Smith's Invisible Hand
4.10 Black's "equilibrium": dreams of "springs" in the market
4.11 Macroeconomics: lawless phenomena?
4.12 No universal scaling exponents either!
4.13 Fluctuations, fat tails, and diversification
5 Standard betting procedures in portfolio selection theory
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Risk andreturn
5.3 Diversification and correlations
5.4 The CAPM portfolio selection strategy
5.5 The efficient market hypothesis
5.6 Hedging with options
5.7 Stock shares as options on a firm's assets
5.8 The Black-Scholes model
5.9 The CAPM option pricing strategy
5.10 Backward-time diffusion: solving the Black-Scholes pde
5.11 We can learn from Enron
6 Dynamics of financial markets, volatility, and option pricing
6.1 An empirical model of option pricing
6.2 Dynamics and volatility of returns
6.3 Option pricing via stretched exponentials
Appendix A.The first Kolmogorov equation
7 Thermodynamic analogies vs instability of markets
7.1 Liquidity and approximately reversible trading
7.2 Replicating self-financing hedges
7.3 Why thermodynamic analogies fail
7.4 Entropy and instability of financial markets
7.5 The challenge: to find at least one stable market
Appendix B.Stationary vs nonstationary random forces
8 Scaling, correlations, and cascades in finance and turbulence
8.1 Fractal vs self-affine scaling
8.2 Persistence and antipersistence
8.3 Martingales and the efficient market hypothesis
8.4 Energy dissipation in fluid turbulence
8.5 Multiaffine scaling in turbulence models
8.6 Levy distributions
8.7 Recent analyses of financial data
Appendix C.Continuous time Markov processes What is complexity?
9.1 Patterns hidden in statistics
9.2 Computable numbers and functions
9.3 Algorithmic complexity
9.4 Automata
9.5 Chaos vs randomness vs complexity
9.6 Complexity at the border of chaos
9.7 Replication and mutation
9.8 Why not econobiology?
9.9 Note added April 8, 2003
References
Index
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