If this were true, it would be impossible to gain an edge on other investors by having superior knowledge or a superior approach. Professional traders, who make their living trading rather than studying the markets from afar, have always laughed at these ivory tower theories. A good example is George Soros, who has made billions of dollars from trading and is perhaps the greatest trader of all time. Institutions may be well advised to invest in index funds rather than making specific investment decisions, but the reason is to be found in their substandard performance, not in the impossibility of outperforming the averages. Mathematicians have conclusively shown the financial markets to be what are called non-linear, dynamic systems.
Chaos theory is the mathematics of analyzing such non-linear, dynamic systems.
The commodity markets are chaotic systems. Such systems can produce random-looking results that are not truly random. Chaos research has proved that the markets are not efficient, and they are not forecastable. Commodity market price movement is highly random with a small trend component. Most beginning traders assume that the way to make money is to learn how to predict where market prices are going next.