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Leptokurtic
Detecting Crashes with Fat-Tail Statistics
We built fatcrash, a Rust+Python toolkit with 15 crash detection methods: LPPLS, DFA, EVT, Hill, Kappa, Hurst, GSADF, momentum/reversal, price velocity, and more. Tested on 96 drawdowns across BTC, SPY, Gold, 23 forex pairs, and equity crises with honest precision/recall/F1 metrics. Plus: which methods transfer to revenue and profit data.
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Leptokurtic
Twenty Centuries of Financial Data: What 240 Countries and 2,000 Years Reveal
We assembled forex-centuries, an open dataset of exchange rates, gold, silver, interest rates, commodity prices, GDP, sovereign debt, and more, across 27 sources spanning 1 CE to 2026 and covering 240 countries. Fat tails are universal. Pegged currencies are the most dangerous. Every currency loses against gold.
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When Rules Repeat: The Fixed Point Ladder
Power Laws, Extremistan, and Non-Ergodicity
Scale invariance becomes power laws; power laws move importance to extremes; extremes make averages unstable through time.
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The Edge of Chaos
The Limits of Knowing
Every method in this series rests on one number: how close a system sits to its edge. Nassim Taleb spent a career arguing that this is exactly the number you cannot trust. For fat-tailed systems the data needed to pin down the tail converges too slowly, and being honest about your uncertainty fattens the tail further. This is the counterpunch, and where it leaves us.
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The Edge of Chaos
Sandpiles and Crashes: How Systems Tune Themselves to the Brink
The last essay left a loose end. Markets can sit near a critical edge where small shocks cascade, but critical points are usually finely tuned, so who keeps a market balanced there? The answer, found in a pile of sand, is that nobody does. Some systems walk to the brink on their own, and that is where their crashes come from.
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The Edge of Chaos
Crashes Without a Cause: Markets as Phase Transitions
Big market moves often show up with no news to explain them. A hundred-year-old model of magnets shows why. When people copy each other strongly enough, a market can hold two moods at once, and the smallest nudge tips it from one to the other. We build the model from scratch, with pictures, then turn it on markets.