By building a model that was simple, but not simplistic—that is, it captured the essence of trading, without getting lost in the details—Johnson showed that his trading cliques model seemed to explain the fat tail distribution in financial markets pretty well. That fat tail took on a characteristic shape: a power law. There were 32 times fewer cliques of 40 people than cliques of 10. There were 32 times fewer cliques of 160 than cliques of 40. And so on. The number of cliques decreased with the size of the clique by an unusual power: 2.5.
