oda.krell,

You come off as a seasoned trader and additionally a person who has wonderfully fine intuition about markets. So good that you have come to conclusions that I have only come across after much mathematics!

I would also like to chime in. I do not mean to seem like oda.krell's biggest fan, but their posts are some of the few substantive enough to revert out of lurker-mode!

Markets, like weather and other complex dynamic systems, are computed locally. The stochastic nature does not come from any inherent probabilistic mechanism - there is no man behind the curtain flipping coins - but rather from the emergence of many computations of individual players at any given time.

Most traders here would agree that profits are possible, that the E.M.H. is not strictly correct. That said, there are times when the market seems more predictable than others. 'Decision points', as you call them, are the times when the market is least predictable, when the equilibrium valuation requires calculated input from the maximum number of traders, and the least number of traders are 'cheating' < -- see the brief evolutionary game theory analogy in oda.krell's other thread.