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I would say it's more than a hope. Any trader whose strategy is closer to optimal will have larger profits over time and come to own a larger and larger fractio

I would say it's more than a hope. Any trader whose strategy is closer to optimal will have larger profits over time and come to own a larger and larger fraction of the market. Though saying that out loud makes me realize optimal doesn't have to mean buying and selling according to true value. Optimal would in fact be predicting the behavior of other participants and trading off those predictions. I still think certain events ground value though: bankruptcies, mergers, and dividends attach a real cost/gain to holding a stock.

lordnacho 6y ago
> I still think certain events ground value though: bankruptcies, mergers, and dividends attach a real cost/gain to holding a stock. Those things are themselves the product of the market price, it's not a one way street. This is what Soros' reflexivity is about.
dash2 6y ago
"It is not a case of choosing those [faces] that, to the best of one's judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those that average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practice the fourth, fifth and higher degrees." Keynes, 1936.