Commentary on "The Manipulator's Sneaky Math to Beat Chaos" youtube.com/watch?v=-jF9gW… The main issue with this video is that the author’s conception of a fair market leans toward a leftist, egalitarian perspective. This view ignores the natural inequalities that arise from differences in people’s knowledge. The author states that a fair market should be even more random, giving everyone an equal chance to succeed, which essentially equates the market to having the fairness of a casino. However, many people criticize markets for being too much like a casino and instead prefer that investing be based on personal values rather than blind gambling. Due to this perspective, the author presents his model as treating people as if they make random trades. Bryan Caplan, in his book The Myth of the Rational Voter, empirically demonstrates that people do not behave randomly; instead, they exhibit systematic biases. Even when exposed to good information, individuals tend to stick to their biases. One manifestation of this in markets is a bias toward past prices and movements, relative prices and movements in competing assets. While the author has in sense conceded this point because to make the argument that people can be manipulated they must look at current prices to potentially update their biases, he still presents a model that assumes randomness. This creates a contradiction: either his model is not entirely random, and he is projecting his idea of fairness onto it, or the model is flawed because it fails to account for biases. Another interesting point is the author’s lack of discussion of what happens in the model when whales (large investors) that also behave 'random'. If whales are also acting according to the author’s model (i.e., randomly), would the results differ from his example of whales manipulating markets? Maybe he did account for this in his modeling, but he didn't seem to show examples of that and it would have made a stronger case had he brought it up. Furthermore, if we recognize that people act based on their knowledge rather than randomly, wouldn’t their actions, when informed by the same information, appear similar to puppet accounts controlled by a single entity? This problem is hard to see when you operate on a leftist conception of markets. Rather than advocating for a "fair" market, it should be accepted that markets are fundamentally based on inequality of knowledge. As an investor, it’s more practical to act according to the knowledge you possess. For example, strategies like dollar-cost averaging over day trading, or investing in businesses you understand because you use their products or services and if that business profits from your use, you will get a return in the form of a dividend. owning that would be a way to own the machine that makes the things you use.