Investing, like business or finance, involves a lot of second-guessing. While the future is always unknowable, we can usually take a good stab at predicting what might happen next by speculating how others will react to an event or trend.
This might not sound feasible. The ongoing banking crisis has served to highlight the unruly ways human fear can quickly lead to unforeseeable consequences.
But despite appearances, human behaviour isn’t totally random. In a 2010 study of millions of mobile phone records, a team of network scientists led by the physicist Albert-László Barabási found about 93 per cent of individuals’ travel patterns were entirely predictable.