Monday, March 26, 2007

Effecient Markets and the Booyah

So can the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) stand up in the face of market manipulations by hedge fund managers.

Shouldn't it

A) Be impossible to manipulate and Efficient Market and

B) Be unprofitable to try

My answer is no is on both counts. The EMH says that the market has priced in all publicly available information. Cramer's antics are based on altering the information available to market analysts. As long as the market in information provision is not perfectly competitive this will be possible.

That is, as long as their are trusted information sources who have the power to single handedly change people priors it will be profitable to make money by manipulating those sources.