watching the second-by-second pricing.  In the first 5 minutes, it went from 38.32 to 38.88 – a 1.46% increase.  In the next minute, it went from 38.88 to 39.72, a 2.16% increase.  For the next 2 minutes, it remained pretty stable.

The experience was hyponotic, and, for the first time, I got a sense of the altered state of being in which securities and commodities traders spend their working days (a state of being that is reflected in thousands of photographs that you see of traders who are frenzied, anxious, despondent, or whatever).  It is easy to see how markets might develop their own dynamics based solely on the ebb and flow of a time series, unmoored by any connection to reality (I believe the term for this is “technical trading.”)