An emergent property is a property that a system has but which the individual members do not.  Let me give you a couple of examples chosen for their impact rather than relevance..!..

If you take a Sodium atom (sodium is a metal that reacts violently with water) and combine it with a Chlorine atom (a poisonous green gas) then you get Sodium Chloride (or table salt, that makes chips taste better).

An alternative example is that of consciousness (let it not be said that this blog  avoids the ‘big questions’!), an emergent property of the relatively simple, but numerous, chemical processes that go on in the wet, grey stuff between our ears.

Chlorine… not good with chips.

So to return to relevance, another example is  ‘price’.  The complex market – with all its participants, their hopes and fears and greed and differing opinions – produces an emergent property we call price. And that emergent property is about all I am interested in.

I know why people put their stops just below prior support and I know why support levels exist. I know what happens when those sell stops are triggered and I know the reasons why that might happen and probable outcomes. But I don’t care about that, I don’t waste my few brain cells on it, I just worry about price as that encapsulates all I need to know about the underlying complex system.

In that scenario price behaves in a certain way. A formal definition of emergent properties describes how they often exhibit patterns not apparent in the individual members of the system.  It’s those very patterns that I exploit. And I exploit them without worrying too much about the underlying mechanisms.

The emergent property of price is all I need for an easy life and hopefully a profitable one.