There is a view, developed primarily by Andrew Lo (2004), at MIT, that financial markets are ecological systems in which different groups (“species”) compete for scarce resources. Called the adaptive markets hypothesis (AMH), it posits that markets will exhibit cycles where competition depletes existing trading opportunities, and then new opportunities appear.
The AMH predicts that profit opportunities will generally exist in financial markets. While competition will be a major factor in the gradual erosion of these opportunities, the process of learning is an equally important component. Higher complexity has the effect of inhibiting learning strategies so that the more complex ones will persist longer than the simple ones. Some strategies will decline as they become less profitable, while other strategies may appear in response to the changing market environment. Profitable trading opportunities fluctuate over time, so strategies that were previously successful will display deteriorating performance,
even as new opportunities appear.
A great deal of research, as reported in the three books of The Alpha Interface series, supports the adaptive market hypothesis.
I began my article on the Future of Financial Forecasting for the new issue of FORESIGHT: THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF APPLIED FORECASTING with a discussion of the AMH. In general, I feel it is not sufficiently appreciated as many people still cling to the outdated notion that financial markets are efficient, random, and therefore unpredictable.
I believe this is the Future of Finance – However Evolution is a slow process and “It’s hard to get a man to understand something his salary dictates he not” ~ Upton Sinclair