What to know about the stock market (2007)

>Taking on risk over the last few decades has paid off in spades.

There's two types of risk here: risk that is compensated by higher returns (eg. buying stocks rather than bonds) and risk that isn't compensated by higher returns (eg. buying OTM options rather than stocks). It's not really clear that higher than expected returns in the past decade or so for "tech stocks and/or crypto", mean that they have higher risk-adjusted returns in the next decade.

If "beat the market" means that you can predict exactly if and when Russia invades Ukraine, then the answer is NO, you cannot know if some drunk soldier is going to accidently shoot off a missile and start a war.

On the other hand, if "beat the market" means that you invest in companies with solid fundamentals and solid management in areas of the economy that are not shrinking at prices that are historically low, then yes you can beat the market in the long term. Buffet and Munger are obvious examples of this.

If "beat the market" means buy everything except NKLA, because that company has obviously been a scam for over a year, then yes "beating the market" is very easy.

- Michael Lewis really only got one side of the story - that of Brad Katsuyama, who had a vested interest in casting HFT players in a bad light to promote his own business - building the new exchange IEX.

- Brad also blamed HFTs for systems at RBC failing to make massive trades like they used to. There was nothing nefarious here - RBC had just fallen behind the time in technology, like trying to send a Fax in a world where everyone already uses Email. If Brad, or RBC, or RBC software engineers picked up the phone and called any of the exchanges, they would probably gladly update them on the industry and save them all the work of re-discovering it themselves.

- The claims about front-running are completely false. Front running would mean that a market maker somehow knows someone's orders at two different exchanges and somehow is able to "get in front of the line" or even know that those orders belong to the same person. This would mean the exchanges leak information or allow certain users "ahead of the queue". None of this is true. What Michael Lewis called front-running, was HFT firms reducing their risk on other exchanges when they would get traded against on one exchange. They did this without any knowledge that Brad Katsuyama was on the other end, or that he was just late trying to make the same trade at another exchange at a later time. There are no guarantees that you can make the same trade at different exchanges - the same rules apply to everybody.

- Unsurprisingly, IEX as an exchange is no different from others, in that they need market makers (a.k.a. HFTs) to provide liquidity on their exchange. I wrote the code for the FIX gateways to connect our firm to IEX, and it was all business as usual.

That said, most of current CPI "inflation" is not economy wide price increases, but comes from 1) car prices, because car manufacturers massively messed up and production is way down for the past two years, and 2) energy, which is from several global market issues. There's also housing, which is not in CPI, but that's also easily attributable to underproduction of housing since 2008 (and probably even for decades before that, honesty).

We are actually in incredibly good economic times, especially considering the massive destruction that the pandemic has wrought, and in the US, the lowered number of workers due to years of reducing immigration. I am glad people are not overly exuberant, but I with they were focused on the things that mattered more.