The most amazing thing

The most amazing thing about markets to me is that no matter how many previous instances I have, I can never find days that are anywhere near the ones we are currently having. It is moving from x day highs to y day lows with impunity and alacrity and then hanging on the balance scale at the end of day when Zeus decides who will win.

I remember reading a book several years ago about Roger Bannister and his breaking of the four minute mile in 1954. At the time there were any number of physicians who predicted that the record was physically impossible to break; one predicted that Bannister's heart would explode to accomplish such a feat.

I was reminded of this in both watching (and hearing) that, once again, in a seemingly inexorable march of highs (and lows), world records were broken throughout the Olympics in Beijing.

It bears mentioning that the events themselves have changed greatly from year to year: not only in the rise of professional Olympians, undistracted from a training (indeed, a living) regimen by employment, formal education or social duties, but as well in the structure of the events themselves. Engineered swimsuits, deeper pools, vacated end lanes, and other such changes in swimming events alone have contributed to the aforementioned increase of extremes.

So too, I'd hypothesize, in the markets: that the year-over-year outdoing of previous records in extremes have as much, if not more…to do with the character, fragmentation and specialization of market venues; the "democratization" of access to various markets, bringing millions of additional opinions and hundreds of billions more dollars in; the rise of electronic, in particular algorithmic trading; better/faster processing speeds in technology; and the like, *ad infinitum*…than of any intrinsic quality of markets