Abstract

While modern economy is generally regarded as the realm of rationality, its most abstract sphere, the stock market, seems on the contrary to be ruled by irrationality and arbitrariness. The essay presents the hypothesis that in the financial markets acts another kind of rationality, centered on the reciprocal observation of the operators, which reproduces some mechanisms typical of the ancient divinatory cultures. These mechanisms allow to explain how it is possible to get informative clues from recursive circles and from the influence of media.