It feels like you're intentionally omitting parts of what I said to make a point, and that I have no hope of correcting your world view, so just gonna clarify for any onlookers then stop arguing further.

> > price is usually purely determined by the net inflows and outflows as decided by humans.

> "as decided by humans", more than 90% of trades are led by bots, so no, price is not being determined by humans.

You skipped past the "MMs just smooth it out over time so everyone gets good pricing at the time and in the size they want it" right afterwards which exactly explains why most trading is between bots! Person A wants to buy 10 shares of Y at time T1, Person B wants to sell 20 shares of Y at time T2, Person C wants to buy 10 shares of Y at time T3. Those are all at different times, therefore bots have to take the other side of each trade, then trade with each other to smooth out prices in between each point.

> In fact, we have seen time and again how some weird companies get a huge inflow of purchases simply because of bots misinterpreting news articles.

I actually clearly see this happening more with humans than with bots. Can you think of a single example attributed to bots? A bot that can misinterpret a news article and lose money is fixed and/or disabled forever. There is no shortage of dumb humans willing to lose money due to a lack of literacy.