The prime mover in a financial market is not value or price, but price differences; not averaging, but arbitraging. People arbitrage between places or times. (...) These arbitrage tactics assume no "intrinsic" value in the item being sold; they simply observe and forecast a difference in price, and try to profit from it.
It takes no great leap of imagination to see how such spurious patterns could also appear in otherwise random financial data. This is not to say that price charts are meaningless, or that prices all vary by the whim of luck. But it does say that, when examining price charts, we should guard against jumping to conclusions that the invisible hand of Adam Smith is somehow guiding them. It is a bold investor who would try to forecast a specific price level based solely on a pattern in the charts.
The genius of fractal analysis is that the same risk factors, the same formulae apply to a day as to a year, an hour as to a month. Only magnitude differs, not the proportions. (...)
...Statistically speaking, the risk of a day are much like those of a week, a month, or a year. But the price variations scale with time.
Real investors know better than the economists. They instinctively realize that the market is very, very risky, riskier than the standart model say. So, to compensate them for taking that risk, they naturally demand and often get a higher return.