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The analogy I like best is that the economy functions like a slime mold. When it senses a chemical gradient that indicates food in some direction it grows out in a very wide search pattern, expanding a lot of resources to move that way. When it finds the actual food, most of the growth withers away and you're left with just a path to the food.

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Would ants be more applicable, with the Fed setting and changing rates equivalent to the queen putting out different pheromones to increase harvesting of food, expansion, etc with investors being individual ants or the more abstracted flow of capital?

I love this analogy, it also tells you why index investors usually do better than speculators: even if you invest pretty broadly across the space there's a good chance you missed the one path to the food.

Curious about the numbers - do index investors really do better than speculators? At what rate? Is it also true it nascent industries, like the AI one in this example?

see the buffet hedge fund bet. index fund investment beat the hedge funds over an extended period of time.

You might see some speculators do better than the index fund investors, but you also might be ignoring all the ones that did terrible.

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