The Market Is People: Why We’ll Always Be Students

What Cancer Taught Me About Markets

We speak of “playing the market” with the confidence of chess masters contemplating the next move. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: the market isn’t a game we play. It’s a game that plays us.

For decades, I’ve watched analysts, economists, and traders—me included—try to decode the market’s mysteries. We build models, chart patterns, and calculate probabilities. We convince ourselves that with enough data, enough sophistication, enough intelligence, we’ll finally understand it.

We won’t. The best we can do is be more deeply aware of it.

The second half of 2024 forced me to confront this truth in ways I never anticipated. First came the skin cancer operation at Toronto’s Women’s College MOES Clinic—my surgeon, who had already removed two melanomas and multiple basal cell carcinomas from my body, told me she was afraid she might be taking half my nose unnecessarily with this one. Then came the words no one expects to hear -- stage three aggressive urothelial carcinoma. “Get your affairs in order quickly,” the leading urological oncologist at the 450-bed teaching hospital linked to the University of Toronto told me. “I’ve booked surgery and there’s no time for a second opinion.”

A nephroureterectomy followed. And in those months of confronting my mortality, sitting with the reality that my body had become as unpredictable and unknowable as any market crash, one question kept surfacing: Why am I so connected to the market? Why do I keep trying to understand it?

The answer, I realized, is the same reason we keep trying to understand anything truly important: because it matters, and because the trying itself is what makes us human.

The market isn’t unknowable because it’s complex, though it is. It isn’t mysterious because of algorithmic trading or global interconnections, though those add layers. The market is fundamentally ambiguous, enigmatic, and obscure for a simple reason: it’s made of people, and people are unknowable.

Think about someone you’ve known for twenty years—a spouse, a sibling, a close friend. Can you predict with certainty how they’ll react to unexpected news? Whether they’ll be brave or fearful when stakes are high? Whether greed or caution will win out in a crucial moment?

If we can’t fully know those closest to us—if we can’t even fully know our own bodies, which can harbor silent threats until they explode into crisis—how can we presume to know the collective behavior of millions of individuals, each carrying their own fears, hopes, biases, and blind spots into their financial decisions?

The market is the ultimate mirror of human nature. It reflects our optimism in bull runs and our panic in crashes. It shows us rationality and madness, discipline and impulse, wisdom and folly—often within the same trading day. The patterns we identify are real, but they’re patterns of human behavior, which means they’re reliable only until they’re not.

This isn’t a counsel of despair. It’s a call to humility.

Facing serious illness teaches you something about control—mainly that we have far less of it than we imagine. You can do everything right and still get blindsided. You can study the data, consult the experts, follow the protocols, and still find yourself in an operating room you never saw coming.

Markets are the same way.

The best approach to markets isn’t mastery but apprenticeship. We are, all of us—whether we’ve been at this for eight months or eighty-three years—perpetual students of something that can never be fully learned. Just as we spend lifetimes trying to understand the people we love, just as we learn our own mortality only when confronted with it directly, we spend our careers trying to comprehend these collective expressions of human choice we call markets.

The wisdom isn’t in claiming to know. It’s in accepting that we don’t, can’t, and will never completely understand—and proceeding anyway with discipline, curiosity, and respect for the mystery.

Because the market, like people themselves, like our own fragile bodies, will always surprise us. That’s not a flaw in our analysis. It’s the nature of what we’re studying. It’s the nature of being alive.

Perhaps that’s why I remain so connected to markets even now, even after everything. They remind me that seeking to understand something larger than ourselves—something inherently unknowable—is not futility. It’s purpose. It’s what keeps us engaged, humble, and awake to the world.

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At 83, after a lifetime in markets—from building electronic trading systems at an award-winning national brokerage to managing client portfolios, once for the family of the chairman of the world’s biggest gold mining company—and after facing what might have been the end, I’m more convinced than ever that our greatest analytical tool isn’t our models. It’s our humility. And our greatest strength isn’t in conquering uncertainty. It’s in dancing with it.

The Gemini DeepMind Team were thrown for a loop on this one. They asked me to give them more material to work with.