THE MARKET IS READING YOU
In the past β long before the internet, AI, and extreme global centralization β financial markets were far more decentralized. There was no single dominant intelligence observing everyone at once. Markets were shaped by many independent participants: traders, institutions, countries, and local economies. Price was the result of their collective actions, not of a single coordinating force.
During that time, traders developed ways to interpret price movement. By studying charts, volume, macroeconomic conditions, and geopolitical events, they noticed recurring patterns in how markets behaved. Over time, this evolved into a shared βlanguageβ β technical analysis, market structure, and behavioral signals. Traders who understood this language could coordinate implicitly, without ever communicating directly.
When a recognizable buy signal appeared, traders who could read it bought β and because enough of them acted in the same direction, the price rose. When a sell signal appeared, they sold β and the price fell. This worked precisely because the language was not universally understood. Only a relatively small group which was sufficient to move the market could read it correctly. Outsiders β ordinary people and most inexperienced traders β could not participate effectively and often lost money as a result.
That environment no longer exists.
Today, markets are highly centralized, monitored in real time, and deeply integrated with AI systems. Massive entities β institutions, funds, exchanges, and state-aligned actors β have full visibility into market positioning, order flow, leverage, sentiment, and crowd behavior. They do not need to guess what traders are thinking. They know exactly.
The objective has changed. The goal is no longer to follow patterns, but to exploit them. Modern systems analyze where the majority of participants are positioned and then move the market in the direction that extracts the most money from them.
If most traders are long, price is pushed down. If most are short, price is pushed up. Classical patterns still appear β but they exist largely to lure participants into predictable positions.
Because of this, no pattern is sacred anymore. Any setup can fail. Any βtextbookβ signal can be invalidated instantly if breaking it is more profitable than respecting it. Markets can move in ways that appear irrational, chaotic, or disconnected from fundamentals β yet they remain perfectly rational from the perspective of profit extraction.
The only true constraint is efficiency. The system always seeks the path that generates the maximum gain with the minimum expenditure of energy, capital, and risk.
This is why markets now move in what seem like arbitrary cycles β psychological waves of fear and greed, narrative-driven hype, sudden geopolitical βeventsβ, and rapid sentiment reversals.
But even these cycles are not purely organic. Narratives shape perception. Perception shapes behavior. Behavior shapes positioning. And positioning determines where the market will move next. The masses believe they are reacting to reality, while in truth, reality is being constructed around their reactions.
This is why trading today is no longer about βreading the marketβ in the old sense. The market is reading you.
