I was taught that stock markets were efficient. Broadly this means that all outstanding information about companies is built into their share prices—i.e., they are always fairly valued. This sad fact was hammered home to students with a series of studies demonstrating that stock market brokers and analysts, people with the very best information, fared no better in their stock market picks than a monkey drawing a name from a hat or a man throwing darts at the pages of the Wall Street Journal. The first implication of the so-called efficient markets theory is that there is no sure way to make
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