The SFI market was born in discussions at the Santa Fe Institute in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. It originated as a desire of Brian Arthur and John Holland to build a financial market with an ecology of trading strategies. Successful strategies would persist and replicate, and weak strategies would go away, creating potential niches for the entry of new strategies. The market was to be a continually coevolving soup of strategies. At the foundation of this was a desire to not preload much into the system, and to let evolution do most of the work. In its purist rendition the strategies and macro.
