> Maybe the people in your Discord group are really smarter than almost everyone else.

I think this is akin to the unintuitive finding that if you randomly chose someone from your friendlist, there is good chance that this person is more popular than almost everyone else. Just being in the friendlist is a positive factor to the capability of making friends.

The vast majority of day traders is not honing their skills and information sharing inside a dedicated Discord group. Especially in crypto, these groups, and not the big Wallstreet hedge funds, are the most sophisticated and skilled at profiting from smaller markets.

> If the smartest institutional traders with the best tools can't figure out the direction of SPY in the short run with any kind of certainty

This is misunderstanding trading. It is all about uncertainty and willing to take risks if EV+ situations arises. Extremely few are figuring out the short run with any kind of certainty, and these few risk being fined or charged with market manipulation. The average person can find profitable coin flips (56% accuracy), which, while far from certain, can be flipped many times. Sometimes such flips are not possible for the bigger smarter institutional traders, because their plays use way more money, and they focus on what they learned over 30 years. Anyone starting in 2010 is able to be more knowledable about crypto trading, than someone with a 50-year trading career (who pays someone a little-less-knowledgable than you, not in-the-know of Discord or Telegram, to write an analysis).

My point is that they can, to a degree. The bigger challenge for them is scaling in and out of the size of positions they need to be in to be profitable.

If you’re playing with thousands, you’re playing a completely different game than someone playing with billions. You don’t have to strategize about how to exit. You just exit.

Many hedge funds outsource the execution of their trades to HFT, which scales in and out over days.

Google Archegos if you want to see what happens when you liquidate billion dollar positions in a hurry.

My point is that they can, to a degree. The bigger challenge for them is scaling in and out of the size of positions they need to be in to be profitable.

If you’re playing with thousands, you’re playing a completely different game than someone playing with billions. You don’t have to strategize about how to exit. You just exit.

No one saw it coming in January. Everyone saw it coming the week that it was starting, which is my point. It’s really easy to tell when the big players start taking risk off.

These people are also tracking senators and congress people’s positional moves, as additional macro indicators.

I found private information posted on 4chan around the 28th of January 2020. It spoke of: the upcoming variant strains, the upcoming lockdowns in Italy, the downright panic with public health officials as they were made aware of how awful COVID is and the need to avoid this panic --so large cities would not find refugee in small towns, leaving only criminals and the poor, effects of "long-COVID" and teleworking on the future economy, the sad fate of those who would die after cytokine storm caused their lungs to fill with bloody liquid and choke (financial analysts are more blunt, reputation-free, than epidemiological analysts). That the financial elite was preparing for the upcoming impacts, and that all money managers were working day-and-night to rebalance and counter risks, aware of the possibility of a (malicious) lab leak (economy collapse, world war, CEO's dying, ...).

The posts said that gold would see decent increase (was around 1650$/kg at the time). That everyone with hotel or travel investments was expected to severely lose, and that most such players were putting their liquid money into other investments, to counter the blow, and avoid charges of insider trading. That the Euro would be the most stable currency, when currency trading due to localized pandemic and the lockdowns effecting purchasing power. That the US stock market will see a short boom, with Fed support, and little other investment opportunities, before a crash and world-wide stagnation will become inevitable. That you want to be in two growth niches for the next 3 years: biotech, for it will see free government-funded research & development, when it can profit in the future on new high-margin (HIV/Herpes) vaccines. Plastics industry, because everything will be wrapped in plastic, environmental regulation will be low priority, and it will be overlooked by retail and play-safe pension funds.

Not only did the financial elite predicted it, they predicted it right. Then felt bad for keeping it private, when they saw US senators selling their hotel stock positions after being informed of the situation in China and prospect of a pandemic, so they posted it publicly for everyone to see and with nothing to personally gain.

The pandemic was predicted (+5 -5 year error bars). The correction was predicted. Individual recession predictors are mostly made through survivor bias. When Goldman Sachs sees a market recession upcoming, they don't put that on Twitter or a newspaper to gain a following. They have people pay for what its worth.

It is also fun going back to 4chan /biz section 5 years. People are not saying now: see, I was right. They did better than the majority of the best, highest-paid, analysts and quants and remained anonymous. But I agree it was really hard to not hit a fish when shooting in a barrel.