we have spent a lot of time this year talking about how financial markets are being swallowed by sports gambling. And meme stocks are back, and crypto is mainstream, and so forth. A decade ago, it was possible to think that investing would gradually become duller and more efficient and more automated, that people would just let robots and professionals manage their retirement savings and would not look for excitement in their investment portfolios. Now that sounds crazy: Of course people want to invest in single-game sports parlays and zero-day options and triple-levered exchange-traded funds and meme coins. And the market gives them what they want. What they want is excitement, volatility, binary outcomes, jump discontinuities, just general chaos, because that is more entertaining than slow and steady compounding.

last week, a meme-stock ETF launched; after hours, it traded at prices that were wildly disconnected from its net asset value. My crude explanation was: “Retail investors got excited to buy the MEME ETF, so they did. During regular market hours, they bought the MEME ETF from market makers, and arbitrage relationships kept its price in line with its net asset value. At 4 o’clock, the market makers went home and the price of the MEME ETF went crazy: Lots of retail investors wanted to buy it, they didn’t care about the price, and nobody was bothering to arbitrage it to keep the price in line with net asset value.”

The point here is not that markets are made more efficient by hedge fund analysts refreshing websites; the point here is that markets are made more efficient by hedge fund analysts working 80-hour weeks to find every possible legal edge to understand companies more deeply and quickly than everybody else.