Random Walk

Biological Parallel

Foraging animals use random walk patterns when resource distribution is unpredictable—Lévy flights mix short steps with occasional long jumps. This isn't aimless wandering; it's the mathematically optimal search strategy when you have no information about where food is. Predictable patterns would be exploitable by competitors or prey. Malkiel's random walk theory argues stock prices follow similar unpredictability: if future moves were predictable from past data, that pattern would be immediately arbitraged away, leaving only randomness.