Order and chance
The markets are currently behaving much as expected, so we can take a little time off to examine some investment issues. Back in the seventeenth century the smart heads of the time (e.g. Newton and Leibniz) came up with the idea that the world was an ordered place with natural laws that we could discover, understand and use to control our environment. As a result, the theory of divine will and inevitable fate got a thorough bashing. But some folks just wouldn’t give up the concept of perfect order in all things and sought to explain anomalies, discrepancies and nasty events as part of a grand design. This was an exercise in rationalisation that provoked Voltaire into having a ton of fun debunking the nonsense. In truth, few things in nature, society or financial markets function with the precision of clockwork. That belongs to the field of classical physics and celestial mechanics. Outside those two areas we have to face up to the reality of chance events and
