A far-off price does not drift. It steps.

§1Four kinds of news that change a long-range price

Almost everything that moves a long-horizon market falls into one of four groups. Recognising the group matters, because they imply different things about whether the move is likely to hold.

The third group is the one people underestimate. A structural change is not a move in one price; it is a change in the question, and it can move every price in a market in the same direction at once. Those are the days on which a whole season's positioning is decided by an announcement nobody in the market had priced.

§2Why the price steps instead of drifting

A deep market absorbs opinions continuously, so its price looks like a line. A thin market absorbs them in lumps, so its price looks like a staircase. That difference is a property of depth, not of the news.

There are two mechanisms behind the step. The first is that the operator reprices the whole field when a fact arrives rather than adjusting slowly; there is no reason for a book to move a long-range price a little when it has just learned something. The second is that on a thin book a single participant can move the quoted price, so the step in the displayed number may be one opinion rather than a consensus.

§3What moves nothing

By far the most common input into a long-range market is a lack of input. Weeks pass in which no fact arrives, no entry changes, no personnel news breaks, and the price sits exactly where it was. There is nothing underneath that stillness; it is simply the market's resting state between facts.

This matters for a practical reason. Because a long-range position is normally checked by its holder far more often than it is re-priced, the ratio between the number of times you look at it and the number of times it has actually changed is enormous. Every look that finds the price unchanged is a small reminder that the position needs no management, and every look that finds the price changed invites a decision in a market where decisions are expensive.

• The price is not an opinion about now
• Stillness is the default
• Checking is not information
• Decisions belong at entry and exit

The pages on leaving a position and on the checklist before buying one are the two places where the decisions actually live. Time in the middle is not one of them.

§4Overreaction in a thin book

Thin markets overreact, and they do it in a specific way: they price the immediate consequence of a fact more fully than the uncertainty it leaves behind. A single personnel change can move a long-range price further than the change is worth, and part of the move is often given back as the market works out that the consequence was smaller than the headline.

This is not an invitation to trade it. The give-back is not a reliable pattern, it is not available at a known time, and acting on it requires an exit on the same thin book that produced the overreaction — which is expensive, as the exit page describes. What the overreaction does change is how a step should be read: as a price reset with a wide band of uncertainty around it, not a settled verdict.

§5What a reader can honestly do with this

The honest use of this page is modest and specific. Because long-range prices move in steps caused by facts, the question worth asking before buying a price is not "will this move in my favour?" but "what facts could arrive, and what would each of them do to the field?" That question has an answer available today, and it is the only forward-looking work the horizon really allows.