This is the story of the founding and early years of the Prediction Company, an early-90′s pioneer in computerized market analysis. The book is a a typical startup tale. It’s good reading if you like that sort of thing, which I do. The question that’s never quite answered is, “were their models accurate, or lucky?” The main characters (some of who also appeared in Bass’s excellent “The Eudaemonic Pie“) are pioneers of chaos theory and were attempting to apply their mathematical concepts to the possibly random, possibly chaotic, possibly manipulated world of finance.
Although not a technical book, “The Predictors” does contain some cautionary tales for people attempting to apply computer modeling to the markets. It’s also interesting to see the seeds – in this 1999 book – of our current derivative-generated recession.