For most of my life, one of the persons most baffled by my own work was myself. - Benoit Mandelbrot

If you can distill the essence of GE's stock behavior over the past twenty years, then you can apply it to financial engineering. You can estimate the risk of holding the stock over the next twenty years. You can estimate how many shares of the stock to buy for your portfolio. You can calculate the proper value of options you want to trade on the stock.

Fractal geometry is not just a chapter of mathematics, but one that helps Everyman to see the same world differently.

Be that as it may, for our present purposes, a bottom line emerges: Stock prices are not independent. Today's action can, at least slightly, affect tomorrow's action. The standard model is, again, wrong.