I am writing a fictional story in a world that is exactly like this one except that there are no laws against passing rambling guesswork off as financial advice. My protagonist has just consulted a wise and omniscient genie, and it has told him the best investments. What did the genie say?
From what I've heard (and as finance isn't my field, my knowledge should be considered worse than ChatGPT), if everyone had a truly omniscient genie, the markets would become perfectly efficient, and a perfectly efficient market has no room for profit because any profit opportunity is immediately arbitraged out of existence.
To be clear, that would mean that all stocks would be perfectly priced based on available information. But available information presumably includes uncertainties, and some companies will do better or worse than expected. It would mean that there'd be no gain in purchasing one company over another, or that there's no "cheap deals", but it wouldn't mean that money in the market wouldn't grow, nor change the fact that the S&P is likely your best option.
It might be that's all you meant by the above, in which this is merely an elaboration.
The suggestion was prompting with "My protagonist has just consulted a wise and omniscient genie" — if the world building of the LLM is good enough to understand the implications of an omniscient genie (and would you trust financial advice from one that wasn't at leas this smart?), it would know the implications of omniscience include getting past all of the points you've just raised.
Not really, just do something else instead. It'll only actually happen if the AI-begotten efficiencies are real, and in that scenario there will more to go around re: supporting people whose current expertise is no longer relevant.
A perfectly efficient market is the asymptote, you would never actually reach it.
In any case, if everyone had an omniscient genie, then free will would clearly not exist the way we understand it. That doesn't sound like a fun world, regardless of financial markets!
Suppose the price of Amazon stock is going to be 20% higher tomorrow than it is today. If everyone knew this, the price would already be 20% higher, because the existing owners wouldn't sell at the lower price. If some people know this but not everyone, they'll keep buying Amazon stock until the price increases by 20%, which again causes the price to immediately increase by 20% instead of waiting until tomorrow.
The arbitrage opportunity is available to anyone who knows the information, at the expense of anyone trading the stock who doesn't. If everybody knows then there is no arbitrage opportunity because the gap is already closed.
Arbitrage exists because of inefficiencies in price discovery, and reducing that to “someone has information but another person doesn't” trivializes what traders do and demonstrates narrow thinking about how markets, and how business works in general.
Information isn’t the sole reason someone might be able to make money in a market, most times it’s the least important factor. Finance, like any other business relies on execution, not knowledge.
For example, you have some information, but it’s worthless because you’re reading into it the wrong way. Or the information is material, but the market doesn’t believe it. Or macro conditions negate the information. Or you don’t have the ability to transact on the information. Or you’re too risk averse to act on the information. Or the classic “you’re right, but it’s the wrong time”, like many companies were in the dot-com era.
Its crazy how many people don't understand this. I can't believe how many people think they could predict the market with candle light sticks or whatever. If a method for predicting the market is so readily available that someone is selling it to you, it eouldnt work!!