Really successful traders spend their obtaining insider information, not massaging public data. It stands to reason that an ensemble of technical trading methods would regress towards the mean.
Some of it can be publicly available data that others just haven't thought to use. In another comment someone has mentioned the Walmart carpark satellite imagery example, where they could estimate trends in Walmart's sales by counting the number of cars in the carpark over time.
Nik Cubrilovic recently demonstrated how information leakage can be used to trade stocks, eg estimating the growth rate of the Adobe Creative Cloud customer base based on assigned customer ID numbers, before Adobe announced the figures themselves:
This is exactly true. I had the pleasure of having a very short sit down with one of the world's most successful traders and he said this in not so many words.
It was more subtle than inside information. He implied that he could actually influence the outcome and hurried me on from that point.
It seemed like the game is not necessarily rigged, but information is power. Regular traders are playing for table scraps compared to the really huge people who play politics, not markets.
What did Soros know about what would happen and what did he actually cause to happen? The story sounds nice on the surface (I made a multi-billion dollar bet on a quote from some guy - lol), but I wouldn't be surprised if there was some back channelling going on.
Using insider information is illegal. If you mean insider information then this is total nonsense. Sure, there are a few that do illegal things (and inevitably get caught since there is so much monitoring going on).
If you read "Lessons of a Street Addict", Jim Cramer pretty much says directly he used to call his contacts at goldman to get info on trades. Reading that convinced me that day trading is for suckers without inside information.
It's only illegal if you are an insider or got it from an insider who realized a gain on it. There's a lot of misconceptions here about what insider trading actually is.
Your middlebrow dismissal doesn't work here because the parent didn't say it's not a problem or that it doesn't happen. The parent is refuting a point that successful traders exclusively become that way by trading on illegally obtained information.
No it isn't. The original comment might not have said "all successful traders spend their time...insider information" but the implication is there as it was stated. Given what the grandparent comment replied with, it appears I wasn't the only one who inferred that message.
Nik Cubrilovic recently demonstrated how information leakage can be used to trade stocks, eg estimating the growth rate of the Adobe Creative Cloud customer base based on assigned customer ID numbers, before Adobe announced the figures themselves:
http://www.itnews.com.au/news/how-an-aussie-hacker-used-info...