Fascinating. It’s called Instant Bloomberg and it’s just AOL instant messenger but only between Bloomberg Terminals. So that is absolutely the “data that insiders rely on that pedestrians will never have” and I’m sure it offers tremendous advantage and may explain why stocks trend in a direction for extended periods of time absent any public news.

I mean there’s no way average joes like us stand a chance doing anything but dollar cost averaging into index funds.

E: imagine if there was a law passed that required those IMs to be public in near-real-time (releasing the transcripts days later defeats the purpose).

I disagree on us average joes not standing a chance. It's pretty easy to ride the wave of popular stocks or commodities simply by following the macro trends in the news and staying informed on global developments.

It's more risky than index funds, but being able to ride a bit of the Nvidia hype and then de-risking those proceeds into an index fund is nice.

You'll probably never win with day-trading or HFT though.

(not financial advice!)