Martingale (probability theory)

In probability theory, a martingale is a model of a fair game where knowledge of past events never helps predict the mean of the future winnings and only the current event matters. In particular, a martingale is a sequence of random variables (i.e., a ) for which, at a particular time in the realized sequence, the expectation of the next value in the sequence is equal to the present observed value even given knowledge of all prior observed values.

To contrast, in a process that is not a martingale, it may still be the case that the expected value of the process at one time is equal to the expected value of the process at the next time. However, knowledge of the prior outcomes (e.g., all prior cards drawn from a card deck) may be able to reduce the uncertainty of future outcomes. Thus, the expected value of the next outcome given knowledge of the present and all prior outcomes may be higher than the current outcome if a winning strategy is used. Martingales exclude the possibility of winning strategies based on game history, and thus they are a model of fair games.

Originally, martingale referred to a class of betting strategies that was popular in 18th-century France. The simplest of these strategies was designed for a game in which the gambler wins his stake if a coin comes up heads and loses it if the coin comes up tails. The strategy had the gambler double his bet after every loss so that the first win would recover all previous losses plus win a profit equal to the original stake. As the gambler's wealth and available time jointly approach infinity, his probability of eventually flipping heads approaches 1, which makes the martingale betting strategy seem like a sure thing. However, the exponential growth of the bets eventually bankrupts its users, assuming the obvious and realistic finite bankrolls (one of the reasons casinos, though normatively enjoying a mathematical edge in the games offered to their patrons, impose betting limits). Stopped Brownian motion, which is a martingale process, can be used to model the trajectory of such games.

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