The true story of how chaos pioneers, Doyne Farmer and Norman Packard, applied learning algorithms to crack the world's financial markets. Apparently it all works and they're making lots of money.
I've read Bass' previous book, The Newtonian Casino (Amazon | BOL), which was about pretty much the same people but working on predicting the spin of a roulette wheel to make money in casinos. From what I remember that was a good read, involving building toe operated computers and stuffing them into shoes, and power supplies in bras and that kind of thing. Yeah, from what I remember that was a good read, but it was a while since I've read it.
So maybe my expectations were a bit high for this book, but I found it a slow read. The sort of book where there's a few long paragraphs on what so-and-so's wife is wearing, or the history of some hotel of other. It was probably intended to "draw out the characters" or maybe it's intended as a book to read on a lazy day. I found it just got in the way of telling the story.
I've had to do some financial prediction using similar techniques a while a go, which brought back some memories when reading about the kinds of issue Farmer and Packard had to deal with: non-stationary time series, bad data, over-fitting, etc. But that's probably what made me impatient with the book. You may enjoy it more.
My rating: OK