Yes, there are a lot of buy side strategies, but what we're talking about here are HFT algorithms that balance out several times a second. They drive much of the liquidity of the markets and are the ones that react instantly to new pieces of information.

By that logic, this does happen: "it should be easy for you to go trade against them and make a lot of money."

So what the hell was your point?

Stock markets aren't zero-sum. You can successfully do long-term investments without having to "trade against them".

Which suggests that:

> "There are lots of people that make money in the stock market by making long term bets."

Is not actually a counter to:

> "Being smarter than the algorithm isn't sufficient [to trade against it] if it is somewhat smart but blazing fast."