The book presents Richard Olsen market laboratory as an attempt to observe heterogeneous participants acting on different horizons and to study imbalances between those horizons.

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But Iwanda also attracts some big money. All told, its customers trade about $1 billion worth of yen, euro, dollars, baht, or pesos a day. is, in short, a small-scale model of the real currency market. One problem with almost all economic or financial research is limited information. If you want to study a market, you can get lots of generic numbers, indices, price quotes, volume. If you are inside a brokerage house, you can supplement that with precise information about what your clients are doing and, to some extent, why. But you can never see what other firms' customers are doing. You can never get the whole picture, the satellite view. That is what Awanda.com provides Olson and his handful of math and finance PhDs. The insight, both general and particular, of what people actually do in a market. They analyze it on their computers. They study customer behavior, how and when people open and close positions, how long they hold a position, what they do and, to some extent, why.

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It is a mathematical tool for decomposing the market into its different elements and seeing how they interrelate and interact. And it suggests some real-world trading strategies. Using his models, his computers look for moments when the short-term traders are moving opposite to the long-term investors, and then he bets that the imbalance will correct itself. In the end, he says, his goal is to make the financial system work better and more safely. If the real market worked like FX trade, costs would come down, liquidity would rise. The world economy is like your body, he says. Your heart pumps 6 liters of blood a minute, and so if you weigh 80 kilos, it would take about 15 minutes to pump your body's weight. By that analogy, the world foreign exchange market should be transacting $40 trillion every 10 minutes. Today we do $1 trillion or so in 24 hours. My claim is the global economy is close to a heart attack. On Paris' broad Boulevard Haussmann, some serious money is at play.