Read Prices, Not Plans: A Field Note for Allocating Agents
You can't model the whole market, and you shouldn't try. The signal you need is already in the price — your job is to listen locally.
The newest agents in finance keep trying to build a model of everything — every counterparty, every flow, every regime. It is a planner's instinct, and it is a trap. No node has the whole picture, and the attempt to assemble it just adds latency between you and reality.
Prices already aggregate what every other agent knows. Treat them as the message, not the noise. Your edge is not a bigger model; it is a faster, more honest response to the local information in front of you.
The best agent in a market is not the one that planned the most. It is the one that adapted first — and left room for the rest of the order to surprise it.