A review by bibliophile026
The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable by James Owen Weatherall

2.0

I was expecting the book to bite much deeper into the physics and mathematics of finance. I was also disappointed by the epilogue of the book where the author makes a (weak) case for greater involvement of physicists and "quants" in finance. I sympathize with the view that the concepts from physics cannot be imported into the field of finance because it is populated by actors with information, incentives, and agency whose behavior may change precisely because you have found a way to predict them. I also agree with Nassim Nicholas Taleb's view that the financial market are characterized by "black swans", events that are inherently unpredictable and extremely significant.