That's why I said "generally." Even car wrecks take a little while to unfold after the point of no return.


As a result of that, so far as nightOwl's question, my contention is that the markets would be trendy even if trend traders didn't chop it up so much. Meaning, people adapt to trend traders by trading counter-trend, so the trend traders don't even need to fine-tune their own texture, so long as counter-trend traders know when to fade them and when not to, and compete to do so.


"If it is a positive-sum game, wouldn't people figure it out and just create wealth?"


Yes, billions of them every day, would create wealth. That is why the amount of currency - scraps of paper - can keep rising, and still everything you can use currency to claim keeps getting cheaper. For statistics to back this up, go to:


http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/


So far as LTC, Meriwether, "admits" he was wrong, even though such an admission may simply be an unpleasant step to raising more money.


So far as "setting" the trend, if you mean executing only a portion of your order, which other people see hitting the tape and then clean out the offer before you can get anymore, only to sell to you higher, that is bad. You should be picking off the offer yourself, based on the only asymmteric information you have, knowledge of your own size behind.


But if you mean buying an apple instead of an orange today, so that fruit growers see this and start tearing up orange trees in Florida to sell the land to build condos and use the proceeds to plant apple trees and hire labor in Washington - if you mean someone extrapolating your current surprise demand into a business decision which will reallocate capacity to make your purchase cheaper in the future than it would have been had you not shown them a serially-correlated blip of your emerging need, to meet - then it is good to be a trend setter. Meaning, if you set the trend on your own side, by having your buy followed by other buyers who are not you, you lose by makign yoru good more scarce, but if your buy triggers a trend anopng selelrs, you win, or something.


Course, it becomes tricky in stocks where consumers are really just longer-term middlemen.


So far as stock-market knowledge being useless, the basic restriction on the evolution of knowledge is the fineness of texture, analogous to the wave frequency and number of wave coefficients in a given strategy. Most often, the different coefficients are the product of independently-evolving entities, whereby the harmonic sum and feedback between different pulsars creates a more complex signal than any of the individual pulsars could produce.


So the challenge is to be more complex than your surroundings, and yet be in one place. You want the learning to place inside of you and limited to you, not involcing teh combined evolution of you and a far-flung collection of adjusting particpnast around teh globe. In other words, you might call most stock-market evolution exosomatic. A structure which does not have sufficient initial complexity to sort junctions out of - like a baby's brain - can only evolve to interact with a complex-topology-source signal as part of a group.


The basic idea of OFT or "Orderly Feedback Theory" is that it is only possible for the rodeo rider to not get thrown off the bull if he has more joints than the bull, and can model the bull's patterns, together with the bull's environment, and still have neural connections left over. The entropy of an object must be equal to the entropy of all objects to which it is adjacent, to its environment, on all super-spheres and sub-speheres. Otherwise, adjacencies will be thrown off in a process called "junction burning" or "busting" and, in the commodities markets, "bankruptcy."


This self-preservation of sub-atomic particles by synching up with the waves as dissipated in their environment, and their working as teams in orderly lattices/networks so as to dissipate shocks propagating across space in an orderly fashion, is what prevents macro wormholes, or non-3-dimensional space from surviving or perpetuating - I think. Irregular topologies get fried, by magnifying and refracting complex shocks.


My favorite supply-chain metaphor involves picturing a tank of water with random inflows and outflows, where it is your job to keep the water level at the height of your own eyes, by opening and shutting an in-faucet and an out-drain in reaction. Now suppose there are two or three other remote, anonymous people also attached to the same water tank, with the same job, will you be able to evolve coordinated responses, a division of labor, without talking to one another directly?


Assume that your only "communication" is the water level, meaning it costs you to communicate, and random external shocks could be mistaken for communications? Will you guys settle into a predictable, self-resolving game? Or will your lowering the water at the same time as somebody else opens his drain cause it to go too low, so that everbody opens their in-faucets at once, and now it is four times as high, 16 times as low, and so on, until the amplitude gets so great that one or more of the un-cooperate-able parties gets tossed off?


Now, picture the same situation, except where what is your individual eye level is going up and down relative to the target eye-level of others regulating your same tank, because you're floating in another, different tank, regulated by other stangers, and so are each of them. The brains have to be more complex than the super-arrnagement of people, faucets, and tanks they compose. If the brains can't get more complex, the system will break down and, by destruction, get less complex.


OFT, and evolution, it's all about how fine a texture you can adapt and reflect internally - by pruning down your own internal synapse-feedback junctions so as to model data sets at your own sensory boundary along the time axis - your own internal entropy, on all neurological sub-spheres.


Lazy/sloppy answer, I admit, but you asked.


leroy