The Misbehaviour of Prof. Benoit Mandelbrot

I bought Prof. Benoit Mandelbrot´s last book with the vane hope that it will make me pretty, intelligent and/or rich. Instead I received a collection of Hassidic folk tales, spiced with Mandelbrot family anecdotes. Mandelbrot is causing a revolution in financial maths, invented the chaos theory and the fractals, but he is no more instructive than a droshe. Example:

(pg. 200) ...in Noah's six hundreth year God ordered the Great Flood to purify a wicked word. Then "were all the fountains of the great deep broken up and the windows of heaven were opened." Noah survived, of course, he prepared against the coming flood... Market crashes are like that... in fact, a hierarchy of turbulence, a pattern that scales up and down with time, governs bad financial weather.

The market's second wild trait - almost-cycles - is prefigured in the story of Joseph. Pharaoh dreamed that seven fat cattle (see pic) were feeding in the meadows, when seven lean kine rose out of the Nile and ate them. ... Given the profits Joseph and the Pharaoh must have made, one might call Joseph the first international arbitrageur.

I call this two distinct form of wild behaviour the Noah Effect and the Joseph Effect. Reshuffle the cards, the original Joseph Effect is scrambled out of existence. The Noah Effect depends on the relative size of each event, remains visible after shuffling.

Cute. Now, I only have to identify a Noah Event to build a boat and survive the general market crash which drowns them all. Or a Joseph Event, where a well-ordered market events will become visible in my dreams and I can profit from monopolizing a vital commodity. Easy. How Noah knew that a Noah Event was coming? God told him. How was that Joseph knew the coming Joseph weather cycle? he took a cue from the Pharaoh's dream of cows. But God is no telling me nothing, and no Pharaoh I know of is dreaming of no cows.

As for my dreams, I dream of no cows but plenty of shiksas, see the pic.