oh yeah I am sorry, I just the announcement post.

I've recently been asking myself why my sentiment against trading firms/finance in general is so negative, and here are some things I've come up with. As a disclaimer, I worked at a trading firm, but don't have too much knowledge on very specific strategies since I was pretty far away from trading (mostly due to me asking to work on web ui).

• There are a bunch of degeneracies in trading that exist in favor of trading firms/"the smarter side" in general. For instance, the volume of market orders is increased by many trading apps hiding the order book, and showing a simple buy/sell button instead. These orders probably fill the happy market maker on the other side. In fact, market makers are so pleased to do this, that payment for order flow exists... The accessibility of option trading to retail traders also isn't great, because they will happily make large negative-EV directional bets by mostly longing them. Yet another example is frontrunning-esque strategies (for example, I imagine something like this happens every month-begin or whenever many retirement accounts auto-invest at the same time?). I don't think such things improve the world.
• For stocks (the fair value of a stock is something like ((profit this year) + (profit next year)^(1-r) + (profit in 2 years)^((1-r)^2) + ...)/(number of shares)), I highly highly doubt that the traded price of the stock is particularly related to that quantity, since (especially for stocks that don't pay dividends) there's pretty much zero arbitrage mechanism to reconcile the two. This makes my sentiment of the stock market kind of similar to shitcoins: they're probably very overvalued, and their price discovery benefits no one. If this is true, derivatives on top of these are also arguably pointless in some sense.
• At least from the random sample of SWEs I've talked to working at my trading firm, I wouldn't call anything particularly interesting. It just felt like normal software engineering, which imo is much less interesting than CP. I don't know about the traders, but I highly suspect the majority of their job isn't mind-blowingly interesting as well...
• Lastly, this is a rather emotional point, but even if everything I said prior was wrong, here is the type of scene that I saw each day when I walked to work: a crowd of people dressed in suits, walking to their finance company or something (most people in finance don't seem to work at trading firms). What do they do exactly? It's kind of hard to say; something about talking to clients, or creating a pitch deck (?)... They probably have some type of business degree. They probably get paid a lot. They probably think that they are important. They'll probably send their kids to private school. Many of them definitely go to the overpriced bars in the area after work to do happy hour with their colleagues. In my opinion, they're probably pretty fucking stupid, and could be replaced by LLMs. Regardless of what the exact mechanisms are that allowed this to happen, it appears to me that there is a large excess of undeserved wealth in the sphere of finance.