The price on a free market is the synthesis of the sum of economic agents' knowledge concerning the anticipated scarcity ratio between two things. It's a complex, dynamic and antifragile cybernetic phenomenon. It's also rather counter-intuitive: for many, Value is conceptually perceived as linked to the effort required to create the underlying, a quantity of work, or to its utility. But that's not the case at all: it's supply and demand alone that make the price, with scarcity resulting from the balance of these two forces.

Information of any kind, regardless of its relevance/veracity/probability, is never revealed to every economic player at the same time. Before it can serve as an input for an actor's action, the information has to propagate. There is no advantage to be gained on the market from information that has already been revealed to others, who have at some point had to act and adjust the price accordingly. It's quite similar to a Cantillon effect, and its consequence is the same: those who are chronologically ahead of the process win.

Everything has been, is being, and will be priced in before you can take advantage of what you think is relevant enough to take advantage of in a market. Unless you're an Insider, and probably the only one, others before you will take advantage of their insights. With leverage, it doesn't take many people to take advantage of information and reflect it in the price. This means that, with modern technology, information not only spreads ever more rapidly through the price, but also benefits an ever smaller number of individuals. Polymarket's predictions for the US presidential election are a very good example.

No technical analysis technique offers any lasting informational advantage: the price is already public, and bots will constantly try to take advantage of the slightest statistical or arbitrage imbalance, much faster than any human and without emotion. No news should motivate a buy or sell order either, because no matter how serious or likely an event is, the news is already in the price. News is never 100% public, there will always be people who know before the majority, and the distribution of information is not homogeneous and instantaneous. The approach of the good family man of the 70s, who read the stock market newspaper and then placed his orders, is obviously no longer feasible. Especially now that psy-ops are legion, including financial/economic news, they are manufactured to manipulate you into making the wrong decisions.

If you can manipulate a group of people into believing that they need to buy or sell at certain times, and often sell various training courses or paid access in the process, then yes, it can be strategically profitable to do so. It's immoral, but we shouldn't be surprised that it exists. On the other hand, what can be done is to reveal the rules of the economic game, of the free market, and the interests of each player, so that everyone can understand what the Nash equilibrium is. This goes beyond simply advising against “Buy green, sell red”.

Trading, in addition to being a basic zero-sum game, is skewed to benefit a minority of insiders who have the informational advantage. Wash Trading, Spoofing, Scam Wick, false price history. Information that can't be verified/proven is a source of manipulation, an additional trap to the detriment of the uninitiated, especially retail investors. To this must be added slippage, the fact that the order book will adapt to your demand. You cannot “extract” value from the order book; an order can only have a positive net conversion cost, not to mention the associated fees. The gain expectancy of trading, as measured in the underlying assets, is negative and therefore not a viable long-term strategy, just a sophisticated, sibylline casino. You can't sell the tops to buy the bottoms as if the market were a cornucopia, the Composite Man can't be beaten.

What can you do if you don't have private, advance information? What strategy should you adopt if you can't outperform the market? Or manipulate others into trading you an asset at a discount? A simple position-holding strategy ensures that your underlying assets can't decrease, and that's already a lot. Much better than the vast majority of traders over the long term. Statistically, it's not 50/50, up and down, it's more like 52/48 and the majority lose by compound interest. The wisdom of DCA without ever selling before Wealth Escape Velocity. This means no training to pay for, no trading effort to make, no fear of News that doesn't change the fundamentals justifying the choice of its store of value.

Bitcoin further encourages this strategy with its inelastic deflationary production and finite total quantity of coins, as well as its blockchain where the history of each transaction and the distribution of coins can be seen. It pushes every individual to these conclusions. Whether by logic or empiricism, we see that coins naturally end up in the hands of entities that don't sell, the famous strong hands that HODL. The entirety of BTC becomes increasingly illiquid over time, as the liquid quantity of coins, i.e. those currently traded, diminishes over time. As time passes, the strength of Bitcoin holders' hands increases, becoming insensitive to any negative information, to FUD, as the flow of liquidity causes a natural selection to the detriment of the weak ones. This on-chain analysis by Glassnode helps us to understand this movement of structural immobility and reveals the Power-Law that links holding time with the probability of immobility.

Advantage in a market can only come from the possession of secret information, be it raw data or the fruit of your fundamental analyses, the complex result of putting it into perspective with other information and its consequences. If we add to this Gresham's Law, why bad money chases good money, we'll better understand why it makes sense to accumulate the hardest reserve of value possible at the expense of the softest, and why Bitcoin is a black hole in cyberspace that can only get bigger as it absorbs all the monetary premiums hidden in other assets and consumer goods. This, therefore, is the final strategy of the economic game: to hold BTC as tightly as possible. Real smart money accumulates BTC for eternity. The HODL meme is even more cryptic and abstruse than it first appears.