Patterns in the patternless.........................

     Patterns are the fool's gold of financial markets.  The power of chance suffices to create spurious patterns and pseudo-cycles that, for all the world, appear predictable and bankable.  But a financial market is especially prone to such statistical mirages.  My mathematical models can generate charts that - purely by the operation of random processes - appear to trend and cycle.  They would fool any professional "chartist."  Likewise, bubbles and crashes are inherent to markets.  They are the inevitable consequence of the human need to find patterns in the patternless.
-Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard Hudson,  The Misbehavior of Markets:  A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence