Can everyday people profit from unexpected world events?
"NASDAQ has Pre and After market : NASDAQ Trading Schedule Regular Trading Session Schedule The NASDAQ   Stock Market Trading Sessions (Eastern Time) Pre-Market Trading Hours from 4:00 a.m. to 9:30 a.m.   Market Hours from 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.   After-Market Hours from 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.   Quote and order-entry from 4:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.   Quotes are open and firm from 4:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. You can trade in Pre/After Market but liquidity is very low. If an ""unexpected world events"" occurs, the volume/liquidity will most certainly increase. Another example is the Forex Market that's open 24/7 around the world. As one major forex market closes, another one opens. According to GMT,   for instance, forex trading hours move around the world like this:   available in New York between 01:00 pm – 10:00 pm GMT; at 10:00 pm GMT   Sydney comes online; Tokyo opens at 00:00 am and closes at 9:00 am   GMT; and to complete the loop, London opens at 8:00 am and closes at   05:00 pm GMT. This enables traders and brokers worldwide, together   with the participation of the central banks from all continents, to   trade online 24 hours a day. src" The NYSE is not the only exchange in the world (or even the only one in the USA). Amazingly, the London stock exchange works on London time, the Shanghai exchange works on Shanghai time and the Australian stock exchange works on Sydney time. In addition futures exchanges work overnight. In the UK there are spread betting firms (essentially financial bookmakers) that will take large bets 24x7. Plus, interbank forex is open 24x7 anyway. And there are a wide array of futures markets in different jurisdictions. There are plenty of ways to find organizations who are willing to take the opposite position that you do, day or night, provided that you qualify.
These scenarios discuss the period to 2025. They assess the deep uncertainty that is paralysing decision-taking. They identify the roots of this as the failure of the social model on which the West has operated since the 1920s. Related and pending problems imply that this situation is not recoverable without major change: for example, pensions shortfalls are greater in real terms that entire expenditure on World War II, and health care and age support will treble that. Due to the prolonged recession, competition will impact complex industries earlier than expected.  Social responses which seek job protection, the maintenance of welfare and also support in old age will tear at the social fabric of the industrial world. There are ways to meet this, implying a major change in approach, and a characteristic way in which to fail to respond to it in time, creating a dangerous and unstable world. The need for such change will alter the social and commercial environment very considerably. The absence of such change will alter it even more.  The summary is available [here](http://www.chforum.org/scenario2012/paper-4-6.shtml) or at the foot of the link given in the header. The much richer paper is [here](http://www.chforum.org/scenario2012/paper-4-1.shtml).  These scenarios are the latest in a series in a project that dates back to 1995. Over a hundred people participated from every continent, over a six month period. The working documents are available on the web. No, he was lucky there are universities where he can earn a degree and learn useful things.  He's lucky he never got murdered by someone desperate for food.  He's lucky there were roads to help him go all the places he needs to go.  He was lucky there were companies where he had the opportunity to network, that there's an economy where such things exist.  He's lucky the modern world *exists*.    But no, he did it all by himself. Economic cycles are highly predictable, but it takes many years of study, and there are many variables involved. Obviously, upon examination of the historical returns of the market, being only half correct about buying near bottoms and selling near tops is more profitable and less variant than buy & hold. If you've spent many decades on this Earth and are honest with yourself, you can sense the various times.  Try now: are we closer to the top or the bottom?  It should be obvious. That's what happens when you artificially juice equity markets and pretend it's good for everyone. And create credit bubbles that reward owners and gut renters.   How is it even a surprise that the fortunes of rich and poor would sharply diverge? Ah, that's the colloquially known Thomas Crown motive. The issue with that is that money is objectively quantifiable to a point, so one can do a risk/reward analysis for the potential profit vs. the potential dangerous of robbery when money is the motivating factor. Risk appreciation, on the other hand, is more difficult to quantify. It's even more difficult when one considers that there's a direct relationship between pleasure from risk and potential danger.   In short, it would change from person to person, so I can't imagine trying to use inductive reason to form any broad conclusions. I'd say only look for business opportunities in areas where you have quite a lot of specific knowledge, or the ability to learn from someone who already has it.  Further, particularly in a saturated market like the one you describe, you need to have a clear idea of how you're going to be better than other players.  It's not enough to just want to do something to make money.  You need a solid plan and a solid angle on how you're going to be better than others.  If you don't have those things yet for what you're looking at, do more research until you do.  If you never get there, don't bother.  You're essentially saying you want to exploit arbitrage opportunities, which is a legitimate way to make a living, but it requires a LOT of market knowledge, because there are probably millions of people doing the exact same thing. "The last 300 years of civilization have been amazingly atypical. We have experienced industrial revolution after industrial revolution.  Economic revolutions that would have changed the world in 1000 AD show up as noise.  Coal, Canal, Rail, Trade, Electricity, Refrigeration, Oil, Gas, Nuclear, Assembly Line, Vacuum Tube, Mass Education, Transistor, Integrated Circuit, Nano-tech, Antibiotics, Slaying of absolute Poverty, Democratic, Feminism, Superhighway, Automobile, Airplane, and on and on and on. A cascade of miracles and world-shaking events that have intertwined and together generated a many century long economic singularity that has upended the entire world and generated today's world. The question you should ask, is tomorrow going to be like today?  And the answer is yes; in weather, and in economics, the most likely bet bet is always ""things keep on going like they have in the short term"".  But next week?  Next month?  That is often not much like today. There is reason to believe that the yield on the above revolutions will continue to propel the economy forward, and that there are multiple promising new revolutions on the horizon. But barring that kind of world-shaking revolution, you are not going to maintain a 5% real return on investment over another centuries for the stock market.  The value of investments has to go up by a factor of over 100 in order for that to happen, and the US stock market is already close to 20 trillion dollars. For it to have a market cap of 2 quadrillion dollars the world economy will have to be much larger than it is today.  And to be that much larger, the world would have to be a much stranger place that values very different things. We are currently roughly a K-type 0.72 civilization.  A simple linear expansion of our power of 100x brings us up to K-type 0.92, which is going to cook the planet from waste heat (not from CO2, but just from the waste heat of the energy it uses!) Efficiency can mitigate this, but only to a degree.  100x more efficient technology is going to less believable than a beanstalk and space colonies. If you believe that the stock market is going to continue to grow at 5%/year for the next century, start investing in really out-there technologies.  Gene editing, virtual and augmented reality, space beanstalks and private lift, miraculously cheap energy storage, etc.  Because simply refining the technology of today won't get us there. Modern industrial civilization has been a miracle factory.  That is what pulled off that growth rate.  If the miracles stop coming, so does the growth. There is a road to it.  It would involve clean energy, mass personal automation and friendly (not smarter than human) AI, and the entire world lifted up to the standard of living of the top 3% of the USA on average.  But it is far from guaranteed." "Consider it this way: ***EVERYONE*** has one or more of those ""lucky events"" in their lives. Every single person overheard the right conversation, or was in the right place at the right time, or had that spontaneous collision of thoughts resulting in a ""eureka"" moment.   The people that are successful are the ones who had the wisdom, intelligence, and/or drive to capitalize on that moment." My problem with your argument is the idea that we make a decision and reap the benefits sometime in the near and measurable future.  Where as the actual outcome of our decision may not be realized until many other decisions are made afterwards, thus making the number of permutations very high.  While I agree there tend to be people who can make better or more informed decisions given a situation, I think you give them entirely too much credit given the long run possibilities of outcomes.  My ultimate point being, no matter who you are, you are limited to being able to consider so many steps ahead or combinations at a single time.  And there are certainly people who make bad choices but get good outcomes, and vice versus.  Since we don't see one person, or a specific model for making decisions I have to believe that one simply does not exist.  So call it luck, kismet, or informed decisions, I think at a certain point people make decisions and reap the rewards of those decisions independently.  Maybe more often than not the informed win, but there have been plenty of smart people out there, with brilliant models and ideas, that go down in flames.  Likewise I've meet some pretty dumb people who happen to be at the right place at the right time and turn the right knob.  Not sure I was clear in explaining my point, its been a long day. Hmm... I don't understand how big of an impact that would have in the long run. In the short-run, I can see it being an issue due to price-inflation.   But long-term, wouldn't the market adjust accordingly? If the prices are raised beyond the individual households' disposable income, people will simply find alternative products.   I guess it would be a terrible thing if they controlled something that is necessary to us. But if that happens, I imagine a revolution will start.   What incentives do the large companies have in doing this? I think you take some pretty big liberties assuming I think people deserve failure. If you assume I think that, please note that this speaks more to how you view people who are not wealthy than I do.  That aside, I think you're using lucky in a way that most people do not in this instance.  Is it lucky to eventually achieve a reasonable goal with decades of consistency? Sure, in the ways that I mentioned - nuclear war didn't break out, no fatal traffic accidents happened, etc.  Do you think that is what people usually mean when they say people who have more money are just lucky? Or do you think they use the term lucky to mean there is no merit basis for the difference?  Side note - I'm not saying everyone with money has it because of merit any more than I am saying everyone without money deserves to be broke. If anything, I'm disagreeing with the semantics used to discuss wealth and income disparity, partly because it is divisive. Eighteen years into his research, Lo had a major insight. One day in 1999 his 4-year-old son took off running toward a gorilla cage at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo. “The mother gorilla jumped right in and growled,” he says. “And as soon as she did that, I did the same thing. I ran to my child and brought him back.” The similarity of their reactions startled Lo and caused him to wonder: Could there be other similarities in the way people and animals react to danger and risk?  The insight eventually led to the adaptive-markets hypothesis. “Right now, we tend to collect prices and assume that those are the only things that matter” to predict investor behavior, Lo says, whereas an ecologist would try to understand investors as a population—which means accounting for their animal instincts. Lo’s hypothesis says people act in their own self-interest but frequently make mistakes, figure out where they’ve erred, and change their behaviors. The broader system also adapts. These complex interactions contribute to our booms and busts.  Lo’s book-length exploration of the idea, Adaptive Markets, came out in February. Says Ben Golub, a founding partner at BlackRock Inc. and now co-head of the company’s risk and quantitative analysis group: “It makes you realize that at any time in the market, the people who are there are not there by accident.” Some people survived the last financial crisis and might be more risk-averse, and some people who’ve joined since might be more risk-tolerant. “The cautious guys survive for a while and then get pushed out by the more aggressive risk takers, who then get thrown out when the thing blows up in their faces,” Golub says. He’s made the book required reading for many BlackRock employees. I've seen a lot of people with what seems to be important titles next to their names talk about a stock market/U.S. dollar collapse or bubble burst. Is there anyone with any insight to the potential of something like this happening? "If they could really do this, do you really think they would be wasting their time offering this course? You are being lied to. (Or more accurately: It's certainly possible to gamble and get lucky, but those gambles are  more likely to result in your rapidly  losing your money than in your rapidly gaining value.) It is possible to make money in the market. But ""market rate of return"" has historically averaged around  8%. That won't make you rich by itself, but it's better return than you can get from banks... at higher risk, please note. There are places in the market where, by accepting more risk of losing your money, you can improve on that 8%. For me the risk and effort are too much for the potential additional gains, but de gustibus." Think about Wall Street. It's the most highly paid occupation in the world and it's nothing but a casino. I don't think the article is saying that success is only luck, or that there aren't successes built far more on genius than luck, but that luck is the main factor in the majority of cases of great wealth.