At any point in time yes, this is an accurate description. When you integrate over time it’s not. At the end of the line it’s people betting with advanced tools for execution of their bets. Behind the mathematical beauty of risk free and arbitrage, there is a reality of someone, somewhere making a bet at end of a line of contracts. And there is also someone making the opposite bet. Markets are not disseminating information but beliefs as a proxy for information, and as such they are much more human than you would think. The end game is a network of beliefs, livelihoods, politics and petty or grand aspirations, the same mess as in any organisation. The only reason you question the futility of this one specifically is that it’s a clean room abstraction of the futility embedded everywhere. I would call it futility as a service.