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As observed by Keynes - the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

Being proven right eventually can have great personal value. There is no guarantee that this will also translate into monetary value.




This Keynes quote gets passed around a lot.

However people identify places the market is irrational and use it to make profitable trades every single day. These irrationalities don't automatically translate into favorable trades, but they can be used to help inform which trades are good and which are bad.


True, the quote though is a warning to people trading rationally.


Different perspective: the market is always right and it's the individual that is wrong in the moment.

Successful day traders over the long term learn to be fairly humble.


That different perspective has its own failure mode: people who take "the market is always right" as it being right about the state of the world, or (worse) ethics, and try to divine information about the world and themselves by checking with "what market thinks".

The two perspectives are really just saying that the market does what it does, and by trading on it, you're playing with a game that's only loosely correlated with anything outside of it. It's a mistake to expect the market will closely follow what's going on in the real world, just as much as it's a mistake to expect to get great insights about the real world from what the market is "thinking".


In this context I mean price. Nothing else.

Ask an economist or investor why the market goes up or down and you'll get many reasons, some may be right, some may be wrong.

Ask a trader why the market goes up or down and you'll get supply exceeded demand, or vice versa.

You can have a fun debate about everything the first two care about, but at the end of the day, only the price action will feed your family or improve/worsen your standard of living.




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