While this is a fun intellectually stimulating nerd toy for engineers, trading just doesn’t make sense to me.
Making massive sums of money from bad policies of governments, shorting companies or even entire countries and making money from wars by shorting and longing commodities is a repugnant way of making money and is immoral.
This is no better than crypto trading and gambling.
Skill issue. Let me if I can help. Look up "price discovery" and try to understand how it's a service to the world.
> bad policies of governments... wars...
What's wrong with helping the markets react calmly and accurately to these events? Is a surgeon evil for treating a tumor, or a farmer for addressing your hunger?
> This is no better than crypto trading and gambling
Crypto is subject to much debate, but gambling does nothing to help with efficient markets, liquidity, or capital formation. It's strictly worse than trading actual assets.
> What's wrong with helping the markets react calmly and accurately to these events? Is a surgeon evil for treating a tumor, or a farmer for addressing your hunger?
Great Strawman. A surgeon is more morally good than a trader or hedge fund waiting to short companies to profit from their demise, or it's cousin the private equity industry buying up shares to take over companies and laying people off to make a profit.
You seem to have already forgotten it was these people that caused the 2008 crash with scandals (Look up the LIBOR scandal to remind you) not surgeons or farmers.
> Crypto is subject to much debate, but gambling does nothing to help with efficient markets, liquidity, or capital formation. It's strictly worse than trading actual assets.
I don't think that SPACs, GameStop and other hundreds of unprofitable companies IPOing in the 2010s to 2022s were efficient markets and lots of traders made billions out of them.
A doctor or farmer as you describe have far more morals than these people, as traders and the finance industry make obscene amounts of money while doing this from their desks doing virtually nothing and contributing nothing to the industries and especially society.
Wall Street has invaded tech and the reverse is happening already because the FAANG boom is now over.
The economy gets a shock, a trader helps the market absorb it.
Lots of other confusion here, but I don't really care to go point by point, since you seem pretty determined to believe that markets "contribut[e] nothing to the industries and especially society". Maybe someday you'll come back to this topic with more curiosity, but in the meantime if you don't like this sector, you don't have to work in it.
That is not the same thing for traders and you know it.
> The economy gets a shock, a trader helps the market absorb it.
And in the process the trader "absorbs" and enrich themselves with more profits?
The whole point of my argument is about morals, a trader doesn't have to do what you just said, and why should they? It's all about money in the end without caring for the millions of people in society, traders can bet against the markets and win big, at the expense of the economy without helping anything or giving back to society.
In almost all cases, the traders win in the end, employees of other industries that are affected by the economy always lose, (jobs, income, taxes, etc.)
There is a reason why bankers, traders in Wall St in New York or 'The City' in London are disliked.
it's not complicated. suppose Bob wants to buy an Acura NSX and Kazuo wants to sell a Honda NSX. enter trader Joe. he knows Bob, and he knows Kazuo, and he knows that the Honda NSX was also marketed as the Acura NSX. trader Joe can buy the car from Kazuo, obtain an export license, arrange for shipping and tax duties, and sell the car to Bob for a profit. that is called trading.
you're thinking of "speculation." one could argue that the market needs speculators to take the risks that hedgers want to reduce. speculators might also find interesting information and improve the efficiency of market prices. traders intermediate between speculators and hedgers.
speculation and trading are practically the same to me, the end result is an unhealthy amount of money and immoral profit extraction from virtually doing nothing at all.
my experience of trading and speculation has been the opposite. very little profit (or zero or negative profit) in return for an extraordinary amount of effort and expertise. see Acura/Honda NSX trading.
I have to agree with you in a lot of cases. It is basically too many middle men jumping into the space between buyers and sellers and gambling with the different expectations between them and putting in a lot of work to scrape every potential extra penny.
There is some value in being the messenger, but of course they decide to try gambling with their messages and offers in order to try and extract more value out of their message than it is really worth. And they justify it with their overly convoluted story about having to trade through 6 different people, all of whom are trying to scam each other and end up sending 2nd and 3rd and 4th messages of their own farther down the line letting everybody else see a deal is coming and trying to interject themselves in it to extract more value. Until eventually the seller was driven down to the bare minimum sale price, and the buyer it driven up to the maximum cost they can afford. Both buyer and seller are worse off, but all the gambling middlemen came out of it feeling satisfied that they spent all day pretending they aren't complicit because they only dealt with other middlemen and ignore the fact that the group of them as a whole are scamming buyers and sellers.
They justify scalping products by claiming they mostly only deal with other scalpers and as long as the scalped products are moving around pretend they are providing value.
Making massive sums of money from bad policies of governments, shorting companies or even entire countries and making money from wars by shorting and longing commodities is a repugnant way of making money and is immoral.
This is no better than crypto trading and gambling.