Can we use the stock market itself as a useful prediction market in any way? For example can we get useful information about how long Moore's law type growth in microprocessors will likely continue based on how much the market values certain companies? Or are there too many auxiliary factors, so that reverse engineering anything interesting from price information is hopeless?
No, companies are too complicated. To address your particular example, Intel has three advantages over its competitors. One is that it pushes the boundary of Moore's law, the one point you are interested in. But the other two are that it is probably the best in the world at arranging transistors and that it has close to a monopoly on the 386 architecture, and thus inertia. Even if Moore's law did break down, it is not clear how long it would take for the competitors to catch up.
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