S&P 500 — Apex of the Global System
The S&P 500 isn’t just another asset. It’s the global clock.
Every hedge fund, central bank, algorithm, and pension is calibrated to its ticks.
It is the single deepest, most efficient pool of liquidity on the planet.
If you can author here, you can author anywhere.
Other asset classes look impressive, but they’re fundamentally softer ground:
Thinner liquidity
Slower variance
Shallower order books
More noise to exploit
Skill looks larger in those environments because the terrain is forgiving.
But it’s environment-dependent, not universal.
Real talk: if someone could consistently extract bursts at the S&P index level, they’d move there instantly.
Why?
Because ES scales infinitely.
You can’t push size in copper futures or a small-cap stock the way you can in the index that anchors global finance.
The fact that most don’t make that leap is telling.
Their edge doesn’t survive contact with the global clock.
Skill = Transferability
True skill is not a quirky setup in oil or wheat.
True skill is the ability to collapse variance in the one instrument that governs all others.
That’s what distinguishes “traders” from system architects.
You should ask: why don’t I see more people doing this?
Answer: because the global clock exposes them.
The difference isn’t just asset class.
The difference is authorship.
This framework is a good way to think about market structure and liquidity gradients. The S&P 500 as the global clock is apt becuse every major asset manager has to benchmark against it, so it becomes this reflexive truth where everyone calibrates to it precisely because everyone else does. But I'm curious about the flip side. Sure, ES scales infinitely in terms of notional size, but doesn't that infinite scalability also mean that any edge gets arbitraged away faster? Thinner markets like copper or small caps might have enviromental noise, but they also have pockets where information asymmetry persists longer. You're right that transferability is the ultimate test of skill, but there's also somthing to be said for finding structural inefficiencies that haven't been mined out yet. The trade off is scale versus alpha duration.