On a Constructive Theory of Markets

This article is a prologue to the article “Why Markets are Inefficient: A Gambling ‘Theory’ of Financial Markets for Practitioners and Theorists.” It presents important background for that article — why gambling is important, even necessary, for real-world traders — the reason for the superiority of the strategic/gambling approach to the competing market ideologies of market fundamentalism and the scientific approach — and its potential to uncover profitable trading systems. Much of this article was drawn from Chapter 1 of the book “The Strategic Analysis of Financial Markets (in 2 volumes)” World Scientific, 2017.