Just because the market is "irrational" does not mean that your diagnosis of the irrationality is correct. It is not a binary thing. There's an infinity of ways to be irrational, and most of them are incomprehensible... not the sort of "oh my gosh I can't believe how stupid that is" sort of incomprehensible, either, but literally incomprehensible.
The manner in which the market is being irrational, distributed across millions of actors, many of them greatly more informed than you or I, is all but certainly a rapidly-shifting irrationality, a bubbling froth that changes before you stand a chance of identifying it and taking advantage of it.
Market irrationality probably does not look like a sign hanging out the door saying FREE MONEY, stable for months and years at a time, that mysteriously people are just too stupid to walk up and take. If people aren't claiming their free money, there's probably a reason you don't know about.
(A lot of people desperately need the market to be "irrational" so they can justify putting central authorities over it. But it's really a crazy argument... "the market consisting of millions of entities with all sorts of differing needs and information moving at the speed of electronic data transfer is sometimes "irrational", even if we can't demonstrate that we've correctly identified the "irrationality" by simply profiting from it directly. So let's fix that by putting an entity in charge of it that has a vanishing fraction of the computational power, tiny fractions of a percent of the information, moves at the speed of Congressional deliberation, and has its own independent incentives that do not necessarily align with any participant in the market." The F1 racers are moving too fast, let's send that sloth out to catch them and make them slow down. Surely that will fix racing for everybody.)
The manner in which the market is being irrational, distributed across millions of actors, many of them greatly more informed than you or I, is all but certainly a rapidly-shifting irrationality, a bubbling froth that changes before you stand a chance of identifying it and taking advantage of it.
Market irrationality probably does not look like a sign hanging out the door saying FREE MONEY, stable for months and years at a time, that mysteriously people are just too stupid to walk up and take. If people aren't claiming their free money, there's probably a reason you don't know about.
(A lot of people desperately need the market to be "irrational" so they can justify putting central authorities over it. But it's really a crazy argument... "the market consisting of millions of entities with all sorts of differing needs and information moving at the speed of electronic data transfer is sometimes "irrational", even if we can't demonstrate that we've correctly identified the "irrationality" by simply profiting from it directly. So let's fix that by putting an entity in charge of it that has a vanishing fraction of the computational power, tiny fractions of a percent of the information, moves at the speed of Congressional deliberation, and has its own independent incentives that do not necessarily align with any participant in the market." The F1 racers are moving too fast, let's send that sloth out to catch them and make them slow down. Surely that will fix racing for everybody.)