If there were such collective modes of fluctuation, market players would probably know about them. Economic theory says that if many people recognized these patterns, the actions they would take to exploit them would quickly nullify the patterns. Though economists have little to go on when analyzing stock prices, that does not mean that they lack a fundamental viewpoint about how price changes work. Rather, they share certain articles of faith. One is that small, transient changes have nothing in common with large, long-term changes.
Fast fluctuations come randomly.
The small-scale ups and down during the day are just noise, unpredictable and uninteresting. Long-term changes are determined by macroeconomic forces, the trends of war or recession, forces that should, in theory, give way to understanding. He, however, was looking at continuous cotton-price data from over a century ago. He was looking for patterns, not on just the small or large scale, but rather over both. The numbers that produced deviations from the point of view of a normal distribution produced symmetry from the point of view of scaling.