The market is a very complicated, dynamic system, and the best you can do is run experiments to try and figure out how some small part of it works. It's only a

The market is a very complicated, dynamic system, and the best you can do is run experiments to try and figure out how some small part of it works. It's only a waste of time if you construct poor experiments: otherwise, failure just gives you some more information about the system. With this new information, you can go and try something more likely to be successful. A related trick is to keep the scope of your experiments small so you can feed that information back into the development of future experiments very quickly. (cf. Col. John Boyd's "Patterns of Conflict")