What’s the book The Physics of Wall Street all about?
The Physics of Wall Street tells the story of how, over the last hundred years, an increasing
number of ideas—and, since the late 1970s, people as well—from fields such as
physics and mathematics have migrated to finance. These new ideas have changed how financial
markets work in profound and lasting ways, and so if we want to understand
financial markets, as investors or as policy-makers, we need to understand the
role that physics and mathematics has come to play. Most importantly, I argue that, if used
carefully, these ideas can provide very effective tools for investors. But they
also introduce significant new risks, including some that contributed to the
2007-08 financial crisis. One of my main
goals in the book is to give some insight into how we can use these tools more
effectively, and hopefully avoid future crises.