Are stockmarket crowds foolish or wise, you ask rhetorically? (“The Foolishness of Crowds,” April 9, 2011). And you come out on the foolishness side. Wisely, I would say. As John Maynard Keynes observed some eighty years ago, the stockmarket is a guessing game akin to beauty contests popular in the newspapers of his time. The trick was to guess what other contesters would guess rather than putting your bets on the greatest beauty on offer. Take this to several powers of guessing, and you get a good model of the whole stockmarket game. As you point out, “the wisdom of crowds only really applies when forecasts are genuinely independent, as when farmers are guessing the weight of a bull at a country fair.” As Thucydides reports, this is how the height of fortification walls was guessed by the Greek warriors before the assault ladders were put together more than two millennia ago. The beauty contest is an entirely different game, where a few wise investors are bent on exploiting the foolishness of a myriad others who forever chase their own bushy tails.