I’m not sure I agree that the stock market is mainly a hallucination. It seems to me that when the stock price of a company is out of whack with respect to some “bottom line” evaluation of the company’s worth, then the company becomes a viable target for takeover and dismantling. So, there is at least some correlation between stock price and “actual worth” (whatever that is). My understanding is that Warren Buffet made a huge fortune based on just this idea.

One final comment I have is that another investment strategy is to assume that, even if people know your strategy, they will most likely ignore it in favor of their own, even if yours has proven better over time. This is vaguely similar to Paul Graham’s defense of the use of lisp for server-side programming.