How could stock price histories be described?

Well, one thing that graphs of relative price history show is that their changes are “hairy”. Lots of zeros and lots of quick up/downs. It’s like there is energy stored up, and when it releases, there are sudden jerks. And one jerk leads to another.

Rather like two pieces of rusted metal trying to slide along each other. Do continental plates make the same kind of noise? Would they if they were on a infinite, flat-plane planet? For that matter, isn’t a sphere a good physical model to use for self-referential systems?

Do the jumps represent “the market” correcting an out-of-kilter situation? If so, then that would imply that there is an information bottleneck. When the backed up information is released, the market responds quickly…. implying that the market can respond faster than information is being made available. What would things look like if the market were inherently slower to process available information than the rate that such information is made available? Lost information – or, if the two rates were, over time, roughly equal … queuing stuff.

Or, are these changes caused by bad information that is constantly being updated, rightly or wrongly?

Or, is the market simply being noisy in the absense of information – effectively bouncing between widely separated walls that represent what information is actually available? Imagine that the true value of a stock is between 30 and 35. There is no way to know where inside that range it is, though. Wouldn’t the best market behavior be to bounce against both 30 and 35?

Is there a “true value” of a company?

This all sounds like technical analysis stuff. Without any predictive power.