[evolsb]

There is a significant (pun) difference between statistically significant and economically significant. The conclusion in the drug paper conflates the two. In finance, we could find plenty of statistically significant results (e.g. small cap stocks outperform large cap stocks on Fridays, with a small p-value if you like), but most results were not economically significant--they were not usable for a trading system because they were too small to overcome real-world costs. In short, they weren't meaningful in a real world sense, even though the result was detectable statistically.