From the Publisher
In looking at nonlinear financial economics it is informative to survey the developments that are taking place. In keeping with the information age's ability to absorb ideas democratically, do not look for financial economics ideas only from people with the financial economics label on their degrees or business cards. As financial economics begins to be modeled on principles that have been articulated in physics, computer networks, and ultimately biology, the list of people with insight becomes eclectic. We will see some academics, a practitioner, a computer scientist, and an editor.
TRAIN John Train is a cerebral, patrician, and eminently successful money manager who has also become noted for his many books on Wall Street and finance over the years.
In 1975, Train wrote Dance of the Money Bees, a difficult title to find today. It is the first book ever, to my knowledge, to use a biological example to describe financial phenomena. Bees forage for food, and when they return, the state of agitation of their dance before the hive indicates the status of the find. The larger the agitation the better the find. Train used this phenomenon as an analogy to describe money managers when they are excited by a stock. Of course, fellow money managers and investors follow--they swarm like the hive. It is a wholly accurate, if unflattering, portrayal of how the real world works. Of course, it is now called swarm theory and modeled in computers.
Train's insight was more prescient than even he could have imagined. The same year Dance of the Money Bees was published, John Holland at the University of Michigan was siring genetic algorithm, the mathematical technique and formalism that mimics biological adaptation and which would in time give rigor to Train's intuition. Train effectively preceded the entire field of financial economics by over 20 years in using biology as a paradigm.
Train, in his investing style, is a no-nonsense sort that does not care for academic theory, derivatives, or exotica. In writing Dance of the Money Bees, one of the most conservative men in investing has penciled a sketch that many others, including myself, are trying to complete in color and with technologically appropriate terms. It will be interesting to note Train's reaction to the maturation of his thought. It may resemble Bohr's when he sired quantum mechanics. Bohr said, "Anyone who is not shocked by it has not understood it." The conclusion I would like to draw is that even if Train's peers do not explicitly embrace nonlinear pricing because they find the terminology off-putting, implicitly they do because nonlinearity describes the state of the world that embraces them every trading day of the year.
