Most of the market chatter I’ve monitored in the last week has been about how the investment environment has changed. It’s all bunk. Every bit of it. Very little has changed, most things haven’t changed.

The equity markets have pretty much always been interventionist and corporatist. Just about every “crisis” has been responded to by “reforms” of one type or another. This time is no different, and anyone who thinks it is has no sense of history, or no memory of past events, or both. Likewise, from my perspective as an anarchist, the “debate” about whether this is a move from capitalist to socialist markets is the mother of all straw men. If one doesn’t believe the Fed should exist, the argument over how much intervention the Fed should perform is moot, is it not? We do not have, and have never had, a capitalist system. I think the most value can be added by market blogs when they talk about the solution, i.e., “How do you make money?”, rather than continuing to bloviate about so-called seismic shifts.

Much ink has been spilt, and many numerous electrons have been inconvenienced, by commentary about how the institutional investment world will be changed. Again, it’s mostly bunk. That world is in constant shift as to what specific strategies and vehicles are in vogue, which ones are out- or underperforming this year, etc., and to the extent that there’s a short-term shift, lasting a few years at most (which is short-term by the standards at which such fashions shift), so what? Some speculative excesses are trimmed for now. So what? The speculative excesses will return, not necessarily immediately and probably not to the same exact types of trades, but they’ll be back soon, and in general, will look very similar in regards to the use of high leverage, the pursuit of return without rational regard to risk, and the formation of bubbles. It won’t be very long before trends, trends that can be followed profitably by those nimble enough to do so, coalesce and present themselves for our exploitation.

Some companies and traders got whipped, wiped out. Again, so what? The majority of management from those companies survived and will be in management elsewhere. Corporate cultures don’t change from radical events, except rarely, they change from corner-office enemas. However, what gets washed out must be replaced by something different, and if you think it’ll happen this time on the Street or in the City, you need some historical perspective.

Carry trades of all types, insanely levered, will be on again, and before very long. History won’t repeat exactly, but it will rhyme, and while it won’t be the exact same “toxic debt instruments” carried at low equity-to-asset ratios, it’ll be something close enough that, when you squint your eyes and look at it, you can see the family resemblance.

For the retail hacks, nothing really changed or will change. Trend-following techniques took a hammering, but they’ll continue to work over the long-term, as they always have. Valuation-based approaches have been underperforming, but didn’t they do the same for a couple of years last decade? Does anyone really think that something which has worked since the days of Graham and Dodd is no longer viable, based on recent events? Technically-based day trading won’t be impacted in terms of retail profitability; expect to find just as many “dummy trades” over the next ten years as you would have found over the last ten years. Similarly, momentum-based approaches and all of the fundamentally-based equity approaches will bear fruit over the years to come, just as they have over the past decades. As long as the retail trader has an edge, knows what it is and sticks to it, and stays away from excessive leverage, they’ll profit in the long term, even if there’s some short-term pain.

Are the minutia of the situational specifics different? Meh. In the grand scheme of things, nothing has changed, and there’s nothing new under the sun.

I prefer to focus on what hasn’t changed in investing, because pretty much nothing has changed.