Book: Fractal market analysis: applying chaos theory to investment and economics. By Edgar E. Peters
p.12
We have not yet defined the term fractual. No precise definition actually exists. Even mathematics, the most concise of all languages, has trouble describing a fractual. It is similar to the question posed bt Deep Thought in The Hirchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Deep Thought is a supercomputer created by a superrace to answer "The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything." Deep Thought gives an answer (the answer is '42'), but no one knows how to pose the question so the answer can be understood.
[...] In real life, the self-similarity is 'qualitative'; that is, the object or process is similar at different scales, spatial or temporal, statistically. Each scale resembles the other scales, but is not identical. Individual branches of a tree are qualitatively self-similar to the other branches, but each branch is also unique. this self-similar property makes the fractual scale-invariant: it takes a characteristic scale from which the others derive.
p.17
FRACTUAL MARKET ANALYSIS
The book deals with the issue of conflict between randomness and determination (reworded). On the one hand, there are markets analysts who feel that the market is perfectly deterministic; on the other hand, there is a group who feel that the market is completely random. We will see that there is a possibility that both are right to a limited extent. But what comed out of these partial truths is quite different from the outcome either group experts.
