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Comment by imutemyteam | Hacker News Reader

and not just that, it is literally an information game. You hear that the company's latest car model failed after seeing the quarterly figures.

Obviously, the stock price will go down?

Wrong, the market already knew that the car model failed, and the current price is already adjusted for that.

Stock market trading is only worth it if you have an information advantage. And obviously it is the one with the most capital that has the highest information advantage.

Anyone debating on the internet that "one could make money in the stock market by studying books" is such a joke. Who is going to have more information, the average joe with a book he read; or the guy with a billion dollars with information streaming into his AI.

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Yes but what information is important enough to move the stock price? I agree it’s foolish for individuals to try to compete with professionals, especially on a short-term window. For longer-term investing I believe the playing field is more level because once you go 5+ years out no one really has an information advantage and a huge proportion of traders aren’t even thinking on that horizon.

The information flows are also incredibly complex and self-reinforcing with all sorts of impenetrable feedback loops.

Low wheat yield one year can cause reverberations throughout the world for many years to come. These can affect strategic decisions by businesses, which then affect strategic decisions among their suppliers, and so on.

Eventually the effects of weather patterns die out, but not before they have (perhaps almost imperceptibly) affected every business around the world, perhaps many decades after the initial event.

This, anyway, is how Mandelbrot speculated the autoregression, correlation, and long-term dependence of the markets might arise.

Trying to figure out the effects of an event in that world beyond the simplest, first-order ones is futile, no matter your resources.

This is, IMO, the hardest part about the stock market to explain to new people.

I work with a guy who otherwise seems smart but who just can't wrap his head around information being priced in. His ideas are things like buy retailers right before Christmas and sell soon after, or to buy stocks in cyclical industries because they have low P/Es (at the peak of their cycle). And he is quite confused when market movements fail to match official earnings results.

The people with all the money hire the most knowledgeable/experienced people and invest in the best technology, which end up making a retail investor's ideas of why to invest in stocks look pea-brained. That doesn't mean (IMO) investing in the stock market is entirely a fool's errand for those without that info, but it does mean you should probably educate yourself (not necessarily with books - would a book enumerate all the different ways information can be "priced in"?) as much as possible and, most importantly, stay away from things you don't understand.

There is also a considerable amount of stock market results which you can ascribe to things that an AI-based trading systems, or purely fundamentals-based trading system, couldn't capture. For example if your thesis was that the Internet would grow to encompass a large part of the economy, you would have made a killing investing in promising Internet companies (post dot-com bubble :)) with a long term view and completely ignoring anything like fundamentals. But I suppose that is the difference between investing and trading.

It's even simpler, you need to invest in things which all of us agree too.

Billionaire dosent even need the AI. The CEO of any company will spill out everything.

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