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> Tempts me to pull out of the market again [...] Which is how crashes happen in an imaginary economy.

• mkramlich 16y ago
  That's what is so crazy about the stock market. There's a strong self-fulfilling prophecy effect caused by mob decisions. If enough people think the stock market will go up, there's a surge in demand to buy stocks and so stock prices go up. If enough people think it will go down, they sell, and prices go down. Funny that. So the real money may be in being the minority better, especially if you had some way of predicting what the masses will do next so you can take a position that will be profitable for you once the masses start betting. Thus, there's incentive to do a sort of front-running operation but on a huge scale. And to do it you need a media operation of some sort, and possibly some propaganda organs. Any guesses as to whether these theoretical entities already exist?