News is exit liquidity

There is a moment that repeats so reliably it stops being a coincidence. A company appears everywhere at once, the story is genuinely good, the numbers in the headline are real, and the price goes down. People conclude the market is irrational. The market is not being irrational. It is being early, and the news is late.

Price moves on the change in expectations, not on the quality of the facts. By the time a development is packaged into a headline, it has passed through the people who saw it first: the ones inside the company, the ones watching the supply chain, the funds paying for channel checks, and finally the analysts who write it up. Each layer has already positioned. The headline is the last stop, and the last stop is where the earlier layers get to sell.

This is why "buy the rumour, sell the news" survives as a cliche. It is not folk wisdom, it is a description of who is left to buy. When a stock is at its most famous, the pool of people who have not yet heard the story is at its smallest. Demand that has nowhere left to come from is what a top looks like from the inside.

The uncomfortable version of this: a retail feed is optimised for engagement, and nothing engages like a story that already worked. The reel about the stock that tripled exists because it tripled. You are being shown the outcome and asked to supply the demand that lets someone else convert their outcome into cash.

None of this means news is useless. It means news is evidence about what other people already know, not a signal about what happens next. The question worth asking of any story is not "is this true" but "who already acted on this, and what did they do". That question is answerable from price and volume. The headline will not answer it for you.

The practical consequence is unglamorous. If your process only starts when a story reaches you, you are structurally last, and being last is a position, not an accident. Everything that follows from that, position sizing, expectations about hit rate, how much a single idea is allowed to matter, has to be built on the assumption that you are not the first to know. Because you are not.