“I had a different view,” Soros noted.12 The speculator saw markets as organic and unpredictable. He felt they interacted with, and were reflective of, ongoing events. They were hardly sterile or abstract systems. As he explained it, “The idea that you have a bell-shape curve is false. You have outlying phenomena that you can’t anticipate on the basis of previous experience.” Russia, where Soros’s funds had just lost $2 billion, was an example of just such an “outlying phenomenon” that lay outside the professors’ curves.
