Читать книгу Taming the Lion - Richard Farleigh - Страница 15

Luckily for us, however, the markets are not always efficient. The most likely reasons that a market fails to operate efficiently are that:

 All the relevant information is not equally available to all buyers and sellers. An example would be a bargain in the property market which exists because too few buyers are aware of the opportunity.

 The buyers and sellers all have the relevant information but do not sufficiently understand the implications of that information. Here an example would be when people continue to pay high prices for property even when they know that the economy is going into recession.

Occasionally, it is suggested that some illiquid markets – where there are not many buyers and sellers – are inefficient because they can be unfairly dominated by a few players. However I will argue later that those players usually lose out.

It is possible that markets are inefficient when they are deliberately fed misleading information, as happened with Enron and Worldcom, but hopefully that type of malpractice is on the decline.

With these Strategies, I will try to identify, in a very structured and disciplined manner, where it is that I believe the market does not operate efficiently. This is where we will find opportunities to beat the market.

Unfortunately, most people do not approach trading and investing in that way. Rather, they start with an assumption that the markets are inefficient and that there are obvious buy or sell opportunities. They have vague, untested beliefs, and make comments like ‘the consensus is always wrong’, or ‘the market always overshoots’. Both of which we will see are completely untrue.