"not worth it for the big guys"

Sounds like a legit strategy, but it also sounds like part of it is actively not competing with them.

If that's how you define it, then it was never the question to begin with. Someone just asked how to move on this info, which, we now all agree, is possible. Nobody said anything about competing until it was brought up as a glib dismissal of the original question. Which, we now agree, wasn't warranted.

Moving on this info is competing with the big players.

It was possible to gain by trading on this info when it was news. For the big players, that was 18 months ago, so by now the opportunity to meaningfully trade on this info is exhausted.

For any new information, you can trade on it if you get it at the same time (or before) as the big players, and you can't if you lose in the competition of timely analysis.

Not exactly. The big players often get news before you. However the big players cannot act one small news. That is if you can invest $1,000 for a year at 15% that is a big deal to a small player - but to the big guys the time spending trading that $1,000 is time when they ignore the other millions under their watch and so it isn't worth it. Thus as a small player you need to find those large gains on small investments that are not worth their time.

Actually this news was tradable by both small and big players. It is larger than all the big traders combined after you factor in risk tolerance.

That is nobody sane puts all their eggs in on basket. There was always the risk that vaccine efforts would have found a vaccine for the disease and stopped it in is tracks. There have always been diseases, most don't spread fast enough to be a problem and it isn't clear in advance which are a problem and which are not.

From the OP "Buy TSN, SAFM, HRL...but it's probably too late at this point. We were placing bets on this 18 months ago."

Emphasis mine.

I'm confused. Are you saying placing small bets that aren't worth it for big management firms is a "legit strategy" to perform better on the scale of a retail investor, or not? I'm getting mixed messages.

There are two conversations here:

* Pigs and how to make a buck because of all the ones dying in China. I'm not seeing any good suggestions about how to profit from that for small investors.

* bluGill's suggestion that they can compete with big actors by not competing with them, by looking at deals that are too small for the big fish to be interested in.

The latter seemed an 'in general' strategy and not related to the specific situation with the pork and broader meat industries.

davidw covered it well. To add to his point: I knew about the ASF problem 18 months ago - I work in agriculture and so I follow the news there more closely than the average person. If I had done some thinking about it I would have been able to make some small bets over a year ago - they would have turned out to have great payoff. Of course I would have also made some small bets that didn't pay off - but they would have still been okay because the small bets with the great return would have still paid off about the S&P500 average and as a smart investor I would always diversify my risk.

Differentiated market.