That pole barn was stacked full of worldly possessions--many of them still in the unwrapped packages they'd come in. I had double four foot wide doors which I would close and lock on each trip back to my new home 85 miles north. I'd take a load home each weekend, and the thieves would get as much as they could. I'd left a note asking them to please close the doors to the barn, but they always left 'em wide open.

It took a couple of months but we cleaned out that barn. I left the trash and the stuff I didn't want, but the thieves took everything even the trash. I guess they burned it to keep warm in the winter.

Finally they took the barn. I'd put poles in the ground with concrete but they pulled all of them up except one which broke. I don't know if the thieves or the scorpions got the barrel and the iron.

I did learn I didn't need all that stuff. No the cops never caught 'em...never looked for 'em. In that part of the country everyone is a cop..deputy sheriff. They all have a badge and a gun....like the guy in Tulsa that couldn't tell the difference between a gun and a Tasar.

The point really is that most of the world and the market is random. Most events have a probability of 50/50. Whichever way they go, the final result is skewed beyond any foreseeable certainty. Like the behavior of the scorpions in this true story there are some behaviors that have much greater than 50/50 probabilities. They can be discovered and exploited within the probability they present.

Too much exploitation and the behavior will change. That's why the probability of so many systems that once worked is reduced to 50/50 probability of chaos. Sometimes the probability of an old system is reduced so much as to become a reliable fade.

Finding an edge is not hard because they are difficult to find. Finding an edge is hard because traders are human and behave in predictable ways. By definition people are the crowd, and the crowd is always wrong in the end, because once the crowd is in the market...there is no one left to buy (except those few who didn't follow the crowd) the price goes down....and the rich get richer.