A few years ago, I wrote a magazine article on the mathematics of the stock market. The assignment required that I spend considerable time interviewing the experts and studying the various theories, which is to say, whether stocks engage in a random walk of unpredictable fluctuations or whether their movements can be predetermined. If the latter is true, then the market is indeed a game that can be beaten by the better players, not just the lucky ones. I concluded, as do most experts and virtually all experimental studies on the subject, that for 99.99 percent or so of traders, buying a stock is a proposition, over the short term, at least, no more predictable than a coin toss, and losing money is as likely a result as making it. The remaining infinitesimal fraction comprises those pros who have spent fortunes on computing systems that will sift through vast amounts of data and find the exceedingly subtle patterns in the ebb and flow of stocks. They are also the ones who have the financial wherewithal to profit from those patterns before they vanish.

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