Risks and patterns of the whole market... (Score 1)

Reading Mandelbrot's letter, he seems to focus rather more on the effects of market swings on the society, that on "making money".

Getting better tools to assess the risks to and effects on society of market behaviours seems to me like a good idea. Currently we mostly just look at what happens and try to pretend that it will soon get better.

This isn't about predicting individual stocks. As others have already pointed out, that is mostly about guessing the lottery right. But getting better at predicting how the market as a whole will develop, and getting better control over effects of the various tools we try to affect the markets as a whole with, would be useful.