🧠 Why Standard Financial Expectation Fails You
In classical economic theory, decision makers evaluate coin tosses by calculating expected value across parallel states. When tossing a fair coin with a +50% win and a -40% loss, expected return is:
However, as physicist Ole Peters demonstrated, wealth accumulation is non-ergodic. Because you play sequentially over time rather than simultaneously across 1,000 parallel copies of yourself, your wealth multiplies:
While the average wealth across all parallel universes grows exponentially to over $131,500, almost every individual traveler's sequence decays exponentially toward bankruptcy ($5.15 after 100 steps). By scaling your bet fraction down to the Kelly Criterion fraction (25%), you align ensemble expectations with single-trajectory survival!