If a stock market rally was a colour, what would it be? Strangely, enough there is a group of people on the planet with a condition who might have an idea. Synesthesia occurs in one in 10,000 people and is, at its most basic level - a blending and co-ordinating of the senses. Those with the capacity can literally ‘see’ sounds and ‘taste’ colours. The roll call of famous synesthetes includes Russian painter Kandinksy, physicist Richard Feynman, inventor Nikola Tesla, and founder of Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett.

I was reminded of this phenomenon when I started playing with an interesting new iPad application this week called StockTouch. It takes a radically new approach to presenting stock movements and sectors - using colours and spiral patterns to visually demonstrate market movements. Thinking back to the revolutionary impact of ‘quants’ to stock trading in the late 70s, this app made me wonder whether in the future we would see new types of trading rooms with massive visual displays and synesthetic interfaces. It might take a math genius to write an equation that predicts market movements, but what about a savant that could look at a sea of colour and predict an impending credit crisis? Perhaps one day the world’s greatest funds manager will be an artist.