The Physics of Wall Street

A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable

By: James Owen Weatherall

Narrated by: Kaleo Griffith

Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins

Publisher's summary

After the economic meltdown of 2008, Warren Buffett famously warned, "beware of geeks bearing formulas." But as James Weatherall demonstrates, not all geeks are created equal. While many of the mathematicians and software engineers on Wall Street failed when their abstractions turned ugly in practice, a special breed of physicists has a much deeper history of revolutionizing finance. Taking us from fin-de-siècle Paris to Rat Pack-era Las Vegas, from wartime government labs to Yippie communes on the Pacific coast, Weatherall shows how physicists successfully brought their science to bear on some of the thorniest problems in economics, from options pricing to bubbles.

The crisis was partly a failure of mathematical modeling. But even more, it was a failure of some very sophisticated financial institutions to think like physicists. Models-whether in science or finance-have limitations; they break down under certain conditions. And in 2008, sophisticated models fell into the hands of people who didn't understand their purpose, and didn't care. It was a catastrophic misuse of science.

The solution, however, is not to give up on models; it's to make them better. Weatherall reveals the people and ideas on the cusp of a new era in finance. We see a geophysicist use a model designed for earthquakes to predict a massive stock market crash. We discover a physicist-run hedge fund that earned 2,478.6% over the course of the 1990s. And we see how an obscure idea from quantum theory might soon be used to create a far more accurate Consumer Price Index.

Both persuasive and accessible, The Physics of Wall Street is riveting history that will change how we think about our economic future.

Download the accompanying reference guide.

©2013 James Owen Weatherall (P)2013 Tantor

nice dive into both physics and Wallstreet.

at first I was was a little intimidated by the subject of the audio book, but it turned out to be very easy to fallow.

Be a Scientist...

Would you listen to The Physics of Wall Street again? Why?

Nope, It's long and at the end the guy is like, so it doesn't work, but only because the Wallstreet guys aren't scientists, be scientists. I actually laughed really hard at the end when I made it through this huge info dump just to be told to think like a scientist when dealing with finance...

What was one of the most memorable moments of The Physics of Wall Street?

Deciding whether or not I should go to vegas and try and beat the system before they found me out because of this book.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

No, With this much info I need processing time.

Any additional comments?

It's an interesting and good book overall but the ending killed me.

Interesting history of complex math in practice

Where does The Physics of Wall Street rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

I finished this book in one day. The subject matter was interesting, and was a good basic overview of the history of financial markets and complex mathematics.

What did you like best about this story?

The author sited interesting problems throughout history which I had no idea related to each other.

Have you listened to any of Kaleo Griffith’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

No.

What’s the most interesting tidbit you’ve picked up from this book?

DuPont used its experience with women's leggings to help drive the production of the atom bomb.

Fascinating and intelligent book

The author clearly and enjoyably relates the history of how science and mathematics became applied to finance, highly enjoyable if you have a little bit of popular science background, it serves as a gentle introduction to many statistical and mathematical relationships as well.

In the history of the financial systems modeling

Owen Weatherall gives an in depth historical account of financial systems modeling, from Bachelier to Mandelbrot.

economics updated

It is very interesting to see science change, in our time. I have recently read Physics of Wall Street and these two reads are very telling as to the "underside" of economics in our world.
The book itself is in a narrative style and is of recent date.

Review of the mathematical invasion of Wall Street

Two criticisms: first, somewhat serious is that almost no time is devoted to Jim Simons; second, less serious, is that "Scholes" is pronounced as "Skoles" which is pretty annoying but half-way through someone must have mentioned this to the narrator and I could relax. I guess they decided not to go back and redo the offending passages.

The story is a good one and is told well. It really should have gone deeper into how Jim Simons got started and what he did to be so spectacularly successful.

Fascinating alternate view of the stock market

This is a brief history of various scientists' and scholars attempts to explain and predict the behavior of the stock market. It begins in the 19th century with basic descriptive statistics and ends near the crash of 2007-8 and applications based on complexity and chaos theory. Fascinating for someone with a bit of statistics in their background... but for non-quantitative listeners it may fall flat.

A book for the physics leaning curiosity!

My background in physics with my own personal interest in finance and economics makes this a book I will turn into a curriculum for years ahead.
Thank you!

The title is a bit misleading.

This book is a summary of the entrance of more advanced mathematical analysis to the financial markets. It discusses how this change came about and specific examples of success and failure along the way. I found it distracting and annoying however that the author kept referring to how physics was now a part of wall street. The reality is that the advanced mathematical techniques used by physicists and mathematicians in their daily work made it's way, over time, to the financial world but this does not mean that physics has a new branch of study in finance.