Epilogue: In the Beginning There was Alpha

Hear then, o Economidae, nymphs of the streams
Of infinitely discussed yet discounted prophets,
Of the story which I sing: the epic of men
And women locked in the battle of egos and coherence,
Precision and relevance, the song for all ages
And peoples to hear and revere the great and poor
Deeds of this tribe of malcontents and heroes...

--The Walrasiad, Prologue

Epilogue:

In the beginning, Man created the markets. The markets were without form and void, and darkness was over the faces of analysts. And Man said, “Let there be Alpha,” and there was Alpha. And Man saw that Alpha was skeptic. So Man created Beta from Alpha so that he may have faith. Thus it was that Beta evolved from the aggregate of individual Alpha decisions.

In time Man affirmed that Alpha is only a derivative of Beta and not unto itself. Thus it was Alpha’s fate to be banished to the farthest corners of the market where it thrived little noticed in the wilds of commodities and forex, and strange unknown strategies.

And so it came to be that Beta ruled the markets for many generations and organized itself around the concept of rational agents and equilibrium. And those who claimed to be Alpha were really leveraged Beta or Alpha corrupted by money flows into exotic Beta. And Man saw it was good.

But alas, Man was not happy in his greed and sought more leverage and converted evermore Alphas from the wilds with the trap of untold assets under management. And thus, Beta's down-fall did come about, as Man did not recognize that faith and greed is cause for disequilibrium. Soon the wisdom of crowds became the madness of crowds, and all was chaos in the markets.

This was the way of the markets when the few remaining Alphas, the true skeptics, whose only heresy was to saith that economic agents are irrational and the natural order of the markets is disequilibrium, returned from banishment and did cause great wealth for their kind.

Thus it was that “true” Alpha in its actions restored the equilibrium. From then on it was said by Man that Alpha seeks madness in the wisdom of crowds and wisdom in the madness of crowds.

Hence, price discovery is yin-yang, as is wave-particle duality. In truth, all Man's philosophies reveal this dichotomy as Man is trapped in the observer effect, prisoners of the box in which Schrodinger placed his cat. Ergo, the universe is akin to True Beta and just a huge mechanism for price discovery on a quantum level. And Man saw that creative destruction was good.

- Mack Frankfurter, Managing Director