Most of the disproportionately useful series has looked at theories which have already demonstrated their utility. This time it's prospective: a theory which has made some impact, but whose possibilities have not yet been fully investigated. A declaration of interest must be made - one of my colleagues has taken a lead in developing the analysis, and I have worked on it too.
At the heart of the theory is identification of quantities in a financial market, such as the value of a share or a company, which do not change when a certain event happens. The event is known as a symmetry, because real-world symmetries do not change something when they act on it. Any event which leaves a quantity unchanged qualifies.
There is a piece of mathematics called Noether's theorem which shows that, generally speaking, one can find another separate quantity which does not change over time whenever you have a symmetry for the first quantity. So if you can observe a quantity that is unchanged by an event, you can find another permanent relationship involving a market quantity which may be much less obvious.
The approach has already been applied to find company values, and there is recent work applying it in areas related to financial derivatives. A major potential success would be application to asset pricing theories more widely, and work is ongoing to link the theories.
Financial symmetries crop up everywhere, so investigating them and their related theory can be extraordinarily fruitful.
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