RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:NG NEWSYeah it can't be proven other than in simulation. There are markets that come close (ETF creation redemption).
In general as the penetration of market hedging increases, it makes moves to the downside and upside more violent with a greater percentage of bankruptcies or adverse events (windfall taxes).
In a perfectly competitive market where management was quick to evaluate capital decisions frequently, decline rates were higher than drops in demand and there were no scarce resources (labour, or capital goods) then volatility would be almost zero outside major geopolitical events.
As demand slowly rose, new supply would come into the market immediately killing the price move higher. As demand drops, prices would fall and high cost producers would not be able to deploy capital profitably without taking on speculative risk. The market would be in a state of small moves where marginal high cost producers would be always barely profitable until they closed down or consolidated. And new demand was filled by low cost producers.
This obviously doesn't exist due to 3 year Capex plans, hedging, management production goals being sacrosanct, and the availability of debt.
Peyto uses the "we beat the market x many times" but that is just a product of the time period. That was largely in the period of the great Shale boom where prices have been largely down for natural gas and have been almost entirely in contango (negative roll yield).
The Shale boom is almost the perfect counter argument to the competitive market example above. All debt funded and not through operational cashflow so market growth signals largely muted. Players that were leveraged forced into high hedging by covenants. This created positive feedback on several fronts. The we have bills to pay so we need to produce, I am hedged so I don't lose money on bad capex, maybe prices will be up by the time production kicks in and shareholders bidding production growth.
At least this go around the bankers don't want to lend, the management doesn't want to debt finance growth and shareholders want cash on cash returns... so maybe it won't be so extreme.