The market is a network of actors transacting with each other. Anyone who participates in the market (human and algo) are actors in the market, and they place orders (actants) acting on price as a function of liquidity. (I’ll get to what this means later)

Orders are considered actants as they are acted upon by large actors (liquidity providers).

The relationship between participants is incredibly complex, as it isn’t possible to quantify every single factor that goes into price moving up: it could be economic events, drunk bankers, HFT algorithms, options traders, people gambling their life savings on Robinhood, etc.

This means it is incredibly sensitive to conditions: one single trader buying in could cause a completely different outcome to if that same small trader bought in yesterday. This means it is non-linear and complex. But the market is also deterministic, as if all orders are replayed exactly as they were, price will be the exact same.

Chaos (in the chaos theory sense) naturally emerges from this complex non-linear deterministic system.

We can say price is a function of liquidity because prices are determined by how much trading volume the market can handle, because market makers set prices based on how much demand they expect at different price levels given the amount of liquidity currently available.

However, the market is not entirely deterministic or entirely stochastic: it is easier to predict price at the start and end of a trajectory based on the natural symmetries of the market.