John Kay - The parable of the ox

Interesting - though I am not sure that the Chicago model (Black-Scholes?) manages to generate a price from thin air - it needs important elements (such as the current price and the estimate of volatility).  It is also important to remember that there are people like Buffett making guesses and if the crowd is very wrong, he will be the closest.  John Kay - The parable of the ox:

"One difficulty was that sometimes there were few, or even no, guesses of the oxen’s weight. But that problem was soon overcome. Mathematicians from the University of Chicago developed models from which it was possible to estimate what, if there had actually been many guesses as to the weight of the animal, the average of these guesses would have been. No knowledge of animal husbandry was required, only a powerful computer."

Interesting, non-the-less. '