Probing the link between financial markets and chaotic states, fractals, and related topics dates to the 1960s, when mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot effectively launched this line of research with his seminal study of cotton prices that documented “recurring patterns at every scale in data,” notes Wikipedia. The subject of chaos and how to exploit it for profit is an ongoing arena for study, albeit with mixed results. The Hurst exponent, for instance, attracted a lot of interest a number of years ago, in part due to an influential and widely read review of the indicator by Edgar Peters in his 1991 book Chaos and Order in the Capital Markets: A New View of Cycles, Prices, and Market Volatility.
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