STREET DOGS

From Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jnr:

“The name of the book was The Big Board … It was about an Earth-ling man and woman who were kidnapped by extraterrestrials. They were put on display in a zoo on a planet called Zircon-212.

“These fictitious people in the zoo had a big board supposedly showing stock market quotations and commodity prices along one wall of their habitat and a news ticker and a telephone that was supposedly connected to a brokerage on Earth.

“The creatures on Zircon-212 told their captives that they had invested a million dollars for them back on Earth and that it was up to the captives to manage it so that they would be fabulously wealthy when they were returned to Earth.

“The telephone and the big board and the ticker were all fakes, of course.

“They were simply stimulants to make the Earthlings perform vividly for the crowds at the zoo — to make them jump up and down and cheer, or gloat, or sulk, or tear their hair, to be scared s**tless or to feel as contented as babies in their mothers’ arms. The Earthlings did very well on paper. That was part of the rigging, of course. And religion got mixed up in it, too.

“The news ticker reminded them that it was National Prayer Week and that everybody should pray.

“The Earthlings had had a bad week on the market before that. They had lost a small fortune in olive oil futures. So they gave praying a whirl. It worked. Olive oil went up.”

If the random walk theorists are correct, then earthbound traders are suffering from the same delusions — without a glimmer of doubt that, over the long run, the question of who wins and who loses is determined by skill, not luck.