It’s really hard to beat an efficient market. It can be done, but only if you have the conviction of a visionary, and you see something most people miss. I would never argue you shouldn’t try, but at a minimum, you should pick your spots carefully.
What a contrast between an efficient market where everyone is weighing in with his valuation independently and one characterized by group-think, where only a few are truly looking at the landscape, and everyone else is following along blindly. In this kind of market, anyone able to follow his own obvious observations, not corrupted by groupthink, can clean up.
Let’s use the recent Super Bowl as an example. Imagine everyone thought the 49ers would win easily. All the pundits, the influencers, the “sharps”. In fact, let’s imagine even opining that the Chiefs would win made you look like an idiot, someone who understood nothing about the NFL. In fact, uttering such an opinion not only disqualified you in NFL-savvy circles but made you a social pariah, a person of low-status who could safely be dismissed out of hand not only on football matters but generally.
In such a scenario, what do you think the point spread in the Super Bowl would have been? I’ll say 49ers minus 20. In that case, the Chiefs would have been an awfully good bet — easy money.
Unfortunately for people like me betting the actual Super Bowl, the real NFL market is pretty efficient, and I got only two points with the Chiefs (It turned out to be enough, but the game, which went into overtime, surely could have gone either way.) In other words, I had no advantage over anyone else when placing this bet.
By contrast, it was trivially easy to be right about Russiagate being a fraud, the lab leak being obvious, the "safety and efficacy" of the mRNA shot being a lie, the "climate change" agenda being a power grab, January 6 as an “insurrection” being absurd, Bitcoin being a store of value and Joe Biden's obvious dementia because massive amounts of bribery go into keeping people in the dark about those things.
As the laptop class is incentivized to believe lies in order to get ahead socially and professionally, there is no longer a free market of ideas operating in those spheres. There is thus a giant information gap between those willing to think for themselves and those limited by the parameters of what's socially and professionally advantageous to believe.
If this gap closes, it's game over for the ruling class whose continued authority depends on it existentially. Is anyone going to vote for a plainly demented Joe Biden unless Trump were a fascist dictator hellbent on destroying democracy by fomenting insurrections? Will anyone sign up for vaccine passports if the medicines being mandated are ineffective and outright dangerous? What will be left of your overlords’ credibility should you dare to transgress the boundaries of this modern church?
It’s not surprising they resort to aggressive tactics, including illegal ones like censorship, to prevent these ideas from taking hold should social and professional incentives prove insufficient. (Censorship in the information age seems like a rather desperate strategy, but probably no more desperate than the Church imprisoning Galileo in the hopes of staving off the scientific enlightenment.)
In the meantime, the person who is not limited by what ideas are acceptable to his overlords will thrive relative to the one who is, and the information gap will also translate to gaps in real-world health and prosperity, offsetting the astro-turfed incentives offered to those on the impoverished side of the gap. Once this process persists long enough, and the incentives cease, the scope of the damage done to those who stayed within the prescribed limits will be apparent to everyone.