In the hindsight these people (Soros, Buffett etc.) may sound like geniuses, and maybe some of them are, there is no way to know.
Buffett has been so good for so long that the only plausible way it could be random chance is if he secretly possesses a doomsday device that he activates whenever his investments go sufficiently sour.
Agree for most other successful investors, though.
If I start flipping a coin and half the population guesses heads and half tails and I eliminate the half that guesses wrong, I will eventually wind up with one person with an unprecedented prediction streak.
The Blue Eyes Puzzle (solution) depicts a paradox: people engage in coordinated action despite having no new information, when "I know you know he knows" reaches a critical mass. Apparently the formal system invented to address this is called Common Knowledge.
Duncan Black complains:
The typical, compelling, explanation for this sort of thing is herd behavior. In the absence of new information, the market is modeled as a random walk, and when the amplitude of its swing happens to get high enough, people see a trend, anticipate it continuing, and thereby create the trend and cause a massive swing.
I wonder if you could instead model stock market swings, or other seemingly unmotivated coordinated activity, as common knowledge reaching critical mass. Say new information was injected into the market two weeks ago, and it took that long to reach a blue eyes catastrophe.
I have no evidence for this other than random pattern matching.