With that out of the way, I think there are a bunch of interesting questions Ben doesn't answer satisfactorily (which was the point of my earlier post.)

Well, yeah. He's high on his own supply. Start with the derivative-trading bees and work your way down the turtles.

Assuming that all markets are to some degree chaotic, what do we do with that information?

FUD it up good and proper, obviously. He's big on "everything you know about money and economics is wrong" which is why he focuses so much on "The Narrative Machine", the one column of his he invariably links in all other columns.

Another thing I wonder is why Ben seems so sure that this isn't being done already.

Maybe two years, maybe three, I posted a graphic from Epsilon Theory that was out of some big deterministic bit of software that costs a lot of money. It was comically complex and looked a lot like what a wordmap of the Wall Street Journal would look like if assembled for Kabbalistic purposes. As I recall, you dug into it and observed that it was truly a garbage-in, garbage-out tool and that Mr. Rich Ph.D had shoveled a stable-ful of dung into the processor.

I think he doesn't care. I think he cares far more about the implications of things rubbing together than he does about how they do it. I think he often loses the trees for the forest; however, he spends a lot of time in different forests than myself so I always read his screeds.

The nugget of Ben's writeup, at least to me, is that there's a good argument to make for throwing out all of our economics-related social constructs. Yield spread? Doesn't say shit. Quality? Nope. Death to the KPI, long live computations.

And I reckon that if you told him that, he'd say you got the point.