In the old days, i.e. a few, very few years ago, it was necessary to have information from insider to get rich with back and forth movements in a price. Nowadays it only takes a powerful blog to create a more than profitable market move. What used to be unfounded rumours that moved prices for hours or even whole trading days, until someone officially denied them and the waters returned to their course; today they are more violent oscillations and above all much faster. Just like the information itself. For example, what happened yesterday with Apple's share price and a rumour created to suit the needs of a few clever people outsider. And I say outsider because the fact that he was someone who worked in the company does not qualify him as an insider, he was just a smart ass, or maybe we should call him a great investor who could teach us a lot of things. Just 6 minutes were enough for the stock to lose 4 billion dollars because of a supposed postponement of the Leopard and iPhone launches, this is the original internal post: «This one doesn't bode well for Mac fans and the iPhone-hopeful: we have it on authority that as of today, the iPhone launch is being pushed back from June to... October (!), and Leopard is again seeing a delay, this time being pushed all the way back to January. Of 2008. The latest WWDC Leopard beta will still be handed out, but it looks like Apple-quality takes time, and we're sure Jobs would remind everyone that it's not always about “writing a check”, but just how much time are these two products really going to take?»
Et voilà! 4,15% down between 11:56 and 12:02, closing the session down just 1,29%. The legal battle will now be whether the release was actually leaked from Apple's internal system or falsified externally. In either case someone who has no idea whether or not there are really problems and delays with these products, cleverly made a mockery of the system and the market itself. He must still be laughing as he counts his profits.
So it is no longer necessary to have inside information before others; what is really important today is the extent to which we can disseminate any information and how credible it is. Market efficiency will do the rest. Global markets where it seems impossible to be smarter and faster than others (being riskier is easy). But someone always surprises and proves that it is more than possible, I would even say usual. Who said that the efficiency of markets could not be mocked?
Ultimately it is the difference between the one who hopes for the good fortune of getting insider information one day, and the one who create the luck being an outsider.
Archimedes said: «Give me a sufficiently long lever and a fulcrum and I will move the world». Today we could also move the world with a sufficiently efficient market and a point of intelligence.