"Our understanding of financial markets is shaped overwhelmingly by economics, which tends to view financial market activity from both a numerical and abstract vantage point. Activity on the Street, in the City or simply by the Market is understood by reference to the performance of the Dow Jones on any given day or the FTSE 100 over a certain period of time. This dominant conception of financial markets as rational and dynamic is supported by the Efficient Markets Hypothesis (EMH) which suggests that asset prices generally reflect all available information. One consequence of this widely held belief in how markets operate is that it is impossible to beat the market on a consistent basis. However, although flooded by evidence of investor underperformance, we are still left with the puzzle of why there are still so many fund managers operating in financial markets today who are hired for the purpose of beating the market, outperformance and alpha generation. In Inertia and Stasis in Financial Markets, Crawford Spence, Yuval Millo, and James Valentine argue that mainstream economics cannot explain why so many finance professionals persist in markets while offering negative returns to clients relative to a passive investment strategy. Economic sociology and behavioral economics can answer this question, however. Social groups, they argue, routinely persist and reproduce through habit, routine, and path dependency.

Though there is an assumption on economics of rational, self-directed action, there is no reason to presume that financial markets are immune to social tendencies evident in other domains of life. Spence et al develop and describe the notions of inertia and stasis as key, insufficiently acknowledged features of financial markets. While financial intermediaries espouse dynamism and continuous innovation, they argue that analysis of the behavior of professional in the financial sector reveals behavior that tend towards reproduction and conservatism"--.