Those references are not the authors, and keep in mind that professors usually would not be professors if they had a sufficient understanding of markets to beat them. No one cited in the article has seen a live exchange with as low of volume as Tether/USD, simply because such low volume exchanges are typically considered irrelevant. Lower volume == fewer players == higher impact of a smaller number of traders == attribution of the inefficiencies of a small group of traders to market-wide patterns == clueless articles like this one.

They are experts. The article is written by skilled financial journalists based on the work of experts.

I used to write trading systems for market makers, and still have friends in the business. I also have friends who are professors, including a finance professor. Trading is not really about market knowledge; it's a skill and an orientation. Being a professor is much more about knowledge, but it's also about skills and orientation. They're different kinds of people, doing very different work.

Your "the only people who can possibly understand this are the ones who agree with me" approach is essentially religious thinking. You're making an argument from authority, except the only cited expert is you, an anonymous person with no credentials and no provable experience.

Consider the analogy of playing tennis against a tennis commentator (who wasn't formerly a professional). Sure, the commentator understands the game at a deeper level than your average joe, but it's a very different kind of understanding/skill from the pros making the money. I'd give myself better odds to beat the commentator / SE working for a market maker than the pro / fund manager.

This applies to journalism at large, but for market and trading analysis in particular, professors fit into this category much more than in other fields (such as engineering, where there is still a disconnect between academia and industry). In trading, anyone who truly understands the market at such a powerful level is using that knowledge to make money. It's a complex adaptive system, so publishing financially actionable research in the field is usually pointless because the market adapts. In my anecdotal experience, even engineers / employees of quant funds like yourself do not often really understand the market when they were focused on some specific piece of infrastructure / a part of someone else's larger design. When left alone without the infrastructure and systems they were used to, breaking even is often their best case scenario.

But this is all beside the point. Instead of personal attacks, getting defensive, and bowing to credentials, consider thinking for yourself and addressing the content, if you reply.

Source: I'm an anonymous professional trader who beats the market.

You claim to be a professional trader who claims to beat the market. I understand why you believe this paints you as somebody whose expertise we should trust. But hopefully you can see why to me it's just another anonymous person who claims they know better than everybody else.