Re: September [censored] thread
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I'm 22 and through my 3 years of investment experience I've already grown to hate academia and many of their philosophies about the market. It takes about 10 minutes of looking through financial history and the various ridiculous bubbles that have occurred to see that the masses can and often do mislead themselves into investing in obviously mispriced assets.
When people pay egregious amounts for tulip bulbs, or tech stocks, I don't see how you can make the claim that the markets are perfectly efficient. Academia confuse the markets' responsiveness to information (it is true, the markets respond to all assessments of information perfectly and quickly) and the ability of the markets and their participants to perfectly assess that information and make valid business/ev predictions with it. That is the part that isn't perfectly efficient, and that's where value can be made! Arrrrgh.
It's like drunk driving. The stock market is like the steering wheel and investors are the drunk driver. The perfect responsiveness of the steering wheel to the driver's actions doesn't prevent him from driving into a tree. Or from stumbling into a store to buy tulip bulbs for land and jewels.
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Don't confuse specific theories with this nonentity called "academia" - that sort of broad-brushed emotional thinking is exactly what gets people in trouble in financial markets.
Markets are inefficient because most people are stupid but are too stupid to realize their own stupidity.
For instance, the prior probability that you (or any other person or I for that matter) are stupid is fairly high. You've got to weigh that against evidence you have that tells you that you are indeed not stupid, fully understanding that many stupid people can come up with similar justifications. Most people aren't particularly good at this kind of reasoning and erroneously conclude that they can beat the market when in fact they can't, which is why the efficient market hypothesis is still a useful theory for them. The market isn't the smartest kid in town, but it's far smarter than most (this is nearly by definition).
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