Public markets are the most studied arena in finance, which is exactly why the remaining inefficiencies sit at the bottom of them. A security has to be large enough to hold an institution's position and liquid enough to let it leave. Below that threshold, coverage thins, ownership concentrates, and the ordinary machinery of price discovery starts to miss appointments.
This topic covers what that looks like in practice: float that is smaller than the money trapped inside it, filings nobody reads, positions that a fund can value every afternoon but not actually sell. The edge is rarely a better model. It is usually a smaller one — an account small enough that a market's thinness is someone else's problem.
