There is a fantastic blog post by Ross Rheingans-Yoo about the shortcomings of poker as a tool to teach trading and why Figgie is a better one. https://blog.rossry.net/figgie/
He also wrote an equally brilliant eulogy about Max Chiswick, one of his colleagues, who helped him develop it. https://blog.rossry.net/chisness/
Beautiful eulogy. I don't know the author nor the eulogized but reading the eulogy made me appreciate people like those two (poker players, options traders, sports gamblers etc).
I often see in HN comments about how trading and Wall St in general is evil - when I feel completely the opposite. The two inventors of Figgie may not have contributed directly to curing cancer, saving the dolphins or the whales - dare I posit that most of tech building enterprise JIRA-esque todo-lists, e-commerce middleware and ad trackers don't either.
What I love about their friendship is that I see poker/gambler-mindset of always going for it, shoving the chips to the middle of the table when the pot-odds are good and it is a +EV play. I think they went all-in on several projects such as Figgie, AI Poker and teaching - seemingly all without the whole LinkedIn life coach-advised manner of building up your brand, client-base etc.
The older I get, I find more value too in the honesty of finance and trader types. Yes trading is about money but being honest about that is ironically one of the most altruistic things that can happen for a person. I find that most traders and gamblers who become aware of their greed and selfishness in their work - ironically also causes them to be very generous and selfless people in life due to their constant awareness of that limitation; and to also have zero fox given about what other people think of them professionally and socially (vs. in tech nowadays).
As an options trader/gambler, I'm thankful for the author's eulogy and their efforts in inventing the game. It's a bittersweet story. I read from the eulogy that Max Chiswick embraced the variance of life. Their friendship albeit short and sweet for me is like a fat right tail call option - the holding period might've only been a year and change - but the payoff is one that enriches the soul for life.
I often see in HN comments about how trading and Wall St in general is evil
Trading is one of the least evil things that goes on on Wall Street. Starting wars for profit (e.g., Blackwater) and buying additional houses as investments (as private equity firms do) and making massive job cuts while posting record profits, are all evil. I loathe capitalism but I agree that quants and traders are some of the least compromised people, whereas “change the world” techies and now techzis are the worst. Traders are, as you said, honest about their motivations.
Ultimately there is no ethical production or consumption in a system as rotten as ours, and everyone has to make a choice. Graveyards are full of moral people, and country clubs are full of humanity’s absolute worst. And if one has children, the argument can be made that failing to provide for them is ethically worse than taking a job within capitalism so long as one isn’t directly harming anyone.
Trading between members of our species is part of what puts humans on top; it's another form of collaboration and some other species do it to a degree, but nowhere near the level that we do.
But the evolution from trading x for y to trading x for y governed by z ie introducing fiat currency is the issue.
Lightning trades and trading in general that produces nothing of value is the issue. It goes deeper, with the wealthy able to lobby and keep tax havens legal but I don't expect anything to change so why say anything more on it.
What if curing cancer needs education, applied intellect, and inspiration more than it needs "financing"?
No small number of examples of places with plenty of financiers that have said "aha, we need to have [thing X], let's [throw some money at it]" without much useful results because they don't actually have the necessary people, knowhow, networks, or institutions.
> What if curing cancer needs education, applied intellect, and inspiration more than it needs "financing"?
unlocking liquidity of currently hard to value assets will remove distractions for a broader set of people to get education, apply their intellect, and be inspired including to cure. many people are not applying their intellect because they are distracted by their illiquidity, basically all of their life.
> plenty of financiers that have said "aha, we need to have [thing X], let's [throw some money at it]" without much useful results
misallocated capital is a symptom of current market inefficiencies and has nothing to do with the concept of people working in finance versus whatever you prefer
To me both are beautiful. At risk of getting further tangential lol, microbiology and cancer genomics to me are beautiful competitions like trading between market participants (cancer cells vs immune cells).
What I'm trying to say is I don't buy the notion of humans "conquering" a disease or the virtue of somehow "elevating" ourselves beyond greed. We are just player-actors in both the beautiful cycle of life-and-death and the madness of crowds participating in markets of life (airbnb rental, dating, job, you name it). To pretend otherwise that somehow we can solve and tame uncertainty is -EV.
Worth noting the author's retraction of the figgie post mentioned, which he makes in the eulogy post:
"Put that way, I was (and am) convinced that my original post was arguing against a strawman . I had never actually played the kind of poker that would make a fair comparison!"
I play poker. It really takes thousands of hours to understand the game from a strategic point of view. Then when you have a few very good players, maybe you can start talking about psychology.
Very sad. Max wrote about optimizing nutrition and cited a satire piece about over-optimization ruining someone's life. Then, ironically, he died from malaria while traveling—despite having donated to malaria prevention. Life defies our attempts to control it.
My impression is that he’s sincere, but that his writing is lighthearted and does “overplay” things for humorous effect. That said, I do think he’s opposed to seed oil. Not having looked into it much, I can’t judge whether he’s crazy or not. But even if he’s wrong, who among us _doesn’t_ have some conspiracy-ish views? I’ll go first: I think fruit juice and milk are not “health foods”, and more comparable to soda. We’ve been duped by Big Milk.
Plenty of agricultural subsidies there for sure, but milk and even fruit juice do provide some nutrients (besides sugar and water) so I think it might be overstating the case a little to lump them in with soda.
I don’t think they’re quite as bad as soda, but I do think they’re fairly close. I think this video is what first convinced me (been a long time since I watched, sorry if I’m wrong about small details): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hzyFZcuHmeI&pp=ygUWSGVhbHRoY2F...
I don’t think it requires conspiratorial thinking to believe that seed oils are less healthful than more traditional sources of cooking oils / fats (for one reason or another). Regardless of that, given that seed oils can be produced cheaply and incorporated in to foods to increase profit, “seed oil infiltration” into foods is very real.
You sound very confident and certain, about something which it is not possible yo be this certain about. How do we know with very high certainty that seed oils are not worse for us, say than olive oil?
I am certain in the same way that I am certain there is not a teapot in the same orbit as earth but conveniently on the opposite side of the sun so that it may never be observed.
The hullabaloo about seed oils showed up roughly 5-6 years ago, has no scientific backing beyond the level that gets you flat earthers and climate change deniers, and is now being touted by people like you as something I must be so confident doesn’t exist that now I have to be the one supplying evidence for the claim.
Add in the normal seed oil enthusiast tropes like Big Pharma and now it’s a conspiracy theory based on nebulous and unproven or actors conspiring against everyone who knows the simple answer of just getting rid of seed oils.
There’s a long history of producers making something unhealthy, and suppressing evidence it is unhealthy (cigarettes, corn syrup, milk formula, bacon, the list is quite long). It’s _not that remarkable_ if they’re doing the same thing here. I don’t believe the seed oil thing, this is my first time hearing about it; I just don’t think it’s hard to believe evidence about seed oil health could be suppressed. Given the long history of deceit in food products, I don’t think it’s crazy for people to ask for evidence in either direction.
The seed oil advocates are not asking for proof that a new substance is healthy before accepting is use. They took something that as existed for as long as humans have known you can crush seeds to get oil out of them, have actively harmful properties that they can explain.
They have no evidence and make active claims. If you want to join their side on that flimsy logic because it sounds mean or you don’t like big pharma then enjoy the company you keep
" I don’t think it’s crazy for people to ask for evidence in either direction."
That's literally the point of view that Russell's Teapot is demonstrating as fallacious. There needs to be evidence "for" something before you can argue its validity. Arguing for a statement with no evidence is easy, common, and unfortunately absolutely pointless.
Wow, just read through the eulogy and dug up some further links to explore, by Max Chiswick. Some really amazing content developed by these two, but never widely circulated.
The cabal at Jane Street keeps getting dirtier and nastier. For those of us who happen to have known them from their ivy league days at MIT and Harvard on to predictably careers at JS, HRT or Five Rings, no surprises here.
They all 1)ran student clubs, often time starting their own if they had to, but couldn't care less about the mission or welfare of the group, just so it'd be show leadership skills. They all 2) swore allegiance to Effective Altruism mental without ever volunteering a minute to any worthy cause, most interestingly, 3)interbred only among themselves, possibly because they're too smart to associate with other students.
I find it amazing just how just a few firms on Wall Street seem to fish out all sorts of sociopaths right of ivy league grads. SBF(MIT), R-Yoo brothers (Harvard), happen to have made it to the news so far, but there are new generations coming right behind them - just look for Effective Altruism on their LinkedIn profile.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/24/business/ftx-sbf-modulo-c...
1. If I have an obvious skew in the distribution of cards I've been dealt, I can assume the common suit and hence the goal suit and try to buy the cards of that suit.
2. If the distribution of cards I have is more or less even, then I just save that round and try to make back the base cost.
The hard part has been trying to understand how to update my beliefs based on the trades being made. If you assume everyone is making the rational choice, you might be able to come up with some strategy, but if its against humans who might be trying to bluff, I have no idea. Although, they say its a win-win game, so maybe theres a way there too.
Another way of playing is just simple buy low sell high without considering the goal suit. The reward for this style of playing isn't as high as correctly deducing the goal suit, but it's adequately successful. I think this is similar to market making: no matter how the market moves, the market maker makes a small amount of money regardless.
A better strategy would be to estimate card value based on your starting hand (i.e., probability that each suit is goal suit). It requires some non-trivial combinatorics but I guess if you take the game seriously you just memorize those once. Then you buy cards if the price are lower than your estimate and sell if it is higher. You also should pay a somewhat more for the card that gives you majority (4th/5th).
The updates are in this case, at least assuming others are doing something similar, is to increase expected price if you see sell for higher price and reduce if you see the sell for lower price. To figure out how much to update would be the hard part.
This reminds me of how I got my first job in trading.
They had all the candidates going around doing various gimmicks like mental arithmetic. But one of the things we had to do was a trading game where you had to get a set of some commodity by trading your cards with other candidates. So just a screaming pit of kids trying to declare what they wanted to swap for.
I got dealt a ridiculously good hand, and all I had to do was wait for a couple of people to give me the missing two or three cards.
Once I started, poker was the game the bosses had us play. It seemed like a 10 quid subsidy from the head trader every day, I just had to wait around until he decided he'd played enough and went all in on what was always a crappy hand.
That essay about why poker probably isn't the best game for traders is pretty good btw. But there was a golden age of online poker going on at the time, and you could sit there with 5 tables open if you wanted.
I like the design of the game, having looked at it superficially. It's basically a market for cards, with what seems like a goal for collecting the right suit.
> But one of the things we had to do was a trading game where you had to get a set of some commodity by trading your cards with other candidates. So just a screaming pit of kids trying to declare what they wanted to swap for.
This is Pit, right? I remember it from an Aaron Brown book. Always wanted to try it!
Yeah something like that. There wasn't time to explain anything complicated, just the basic "swap one card at a time with whoever, let me know when you have a set"
I downloaded the app to try it. It's interesting, appears that you can join a game with other players? I see two tabs: "4 starting" and "12 active" But clicking on these had no effect until suddenly the overflow broke rendering.
I am fascinated by this app mostly because it has a recruiting message at the bottom from Jane Street. I've never seen that before.
But, it's also interesting because it is one of the more poorly designed apps I've seen. It's react native when you check out the logs using adb. I bet this was a side project from a Jane Street employee. They did their best.
Interesting, works fine for me on both mobile and web. I am sure there are bugs in it but of the few games I played it worked fine though I imagine live is a much better experience when it comes to live bidding.
But overall this is a fairly common recruiting tool for firms like this, Jane Street is a definite outlier in how proactive they are but its not out of the norm for these this type of top tier org.
Given that Jane Street's prowess is in OCaml, I'm more inclined to give them grace when trying to release a React Native app. RN is one of those languages/frameworks that is both very easy to get into and also incredibly difficult to make a polished app.
RN barely works even if you're an experienced JS dev.
Something is just messed up with it, maybe it's fixed now but 2 weeks ago I tried to build an Expo app and the default template just doesn't build on android. Known issue on GitHub.
Everything is jerryrigged together. Flutter is what RN should of been, but Google doesn't seem to really care about it. Why one company needs multi cross platform frameworks, with multiple languages... I'll never know.
React Native is easy to be tempted into using. It's clever in all the wrong ways, from opaquely ad hoc code transformations to a perennial flux of unfinished transitions between old and new designs for the same things; it's popular and from Facebook; it does its job well enough to convince many developers that malfunctions, bugs and general misery are either an accident or their fault, they just need to hack a little.
But not about flutter. I just used aider to code a brand new flutter app from scratch. It has Google login. And a webview on a second screen. It looks gorgeous and is performant. And deploying it to my android device from within the aider session worked flawlessly.
Ok, I'm glad you mentioned that you have used it in the past. I have not, have only done RN and plain Android using java and kotlin. Your comments are spot on. Thank you.
This game seems like it shouldn't work playing one-off games with no money on the line. How do you win in that context - by ending up with the most money at the end of the game? That would change the gameplay very significantly - a strategy that has you end with $1000 one time in three and 0 the rest should be favoured over one where you end up with $300 every time.
Poker solves this with poker tournaments: everyone starts with say $10,000 in play money and plays until one player wins it all. Backgammon solves it with match play: two players play first to say 7 points. In both cases, additional complexity is introduced to the game as optimal strategy changes depending on the size of the bets relative to the players' stacks or the number of points remaining.
Backgammon is just about playable as a one-off without a cube, though not by serious players. A single hand of poker without wagering makes no sense at all. Figgie seems closer to poker than backgammon, based on my reading. But it's being presented as a game to play one-off with bots or strangers. What am I missing?
I think that is kind of a big deal. You either need to prepare many identical decks in advance or come up with an elaborate selection procedure you repeat every 4 minutes.
I don't think it would be too hard. After the round players throw their cards in by suit face up to 4 piles, every suit gets topped up to 12 cards. Have one person take all four suits under the table and then hands them in random order to the dealer. The dealer randomizes them themselves so nobody can know which suit is which, then removes the required number of cards from the random suits and discards them, and shuffles the deck.
Obviously it isn't super quick, but once people know whats going on it doesn't take that long either.
I assume this was originally played with normal decks, but the screenshots show special decks with only suits.
Doesn't this make a difference to gameplay? With normal suits, if you trade a few times, you may be able to establish that twelve distinct cards are in a suit even though you never saw more than say four of them at once
Maybe there typically isn't enough trading for this to make a difference? If there is, it does introduce an extra skill to the game of remembering the cards that have been seen before. That's valuable in lots of card games including some poker variants, but it doesn't seem like something JS would emphasize training.
If you have 12 identical decks you can turn them into 13 Figgie decks by combining all the cards of each value.
That's true, but it's not very fun. A series of hands in which you determine how heavily to invest allows strategy to control for randomness. A single-hand five-card-draw showdown is a single decision about which cards to replace, and is largely determined by the shuffle, and the single bit of strategy "how many cards did the people before me ask for".
Or let me practice against bots before going live.
Also the notice that my username was taken wasn’t clear (was in white) so i thought the app didn’t work until i learned my username was already taken by scrolling up and seeing the notice that didn’t stand out
Love this. I’d really like to play with real cards, but the uneven suit setup makes that tough as a party game unless the host sits out. I guess you could prepare a bunch of decks ahead of time. At 4 minutes a round you’d need maybe 10 decks for an hour of playing though. To even it out I guess you’d have 12? But that means you’d have more info about what’s likely in later rounds..
Hmm. Maybe I can nerd snipe some into making a deck sorter..
Maybe you could just shuffle a full deck and then peel off 12 cards. Probably better simulates the stock market, there's a good chance somebody is going to get totally screwed (the case where the top of the deck is predominantly one suit). I wouldn't want to play for money that way, but playing for fake money maybe?
I get that Diplomacy feeling where if you pull off cheating, good, it's part of the game. Like insider trading, or when I'd play the banker in monopoly and sleight-of-hand. Ledgerdemain, if you will
You can easily set up the cards with two honest Players. Player 1 sorts and makes four piles S-C--H-D. Player 1 looks away, Player 2 puts 8/12 markers randomly on either the first two piles or the last two piles, then randomizes the piles (so Player 1 gets no information from the order).
The hard part is how to do the trading with real cards. You would have to structure/limit the trading a lot instead of the free-for-all that seems to be going on.
For in-person play with ordinary playing cards and an arbitrary number of players, keep the rules the same except:
* Start with 1 deck per each 2 players. Shuffle the decks together.
* Deal 10 cards to each player, & set ante at a constant 50 chips per player.
* At the end-of-round reveal, the common suit is whichever suit has the most cards. If there's a tie, flip cards from the remaining deck until the tie is broken and the common suit is determined.
I looked at this. I don’t fully understand the game yet. One thing I do not like is the emphasis of speed. Humans should not be making fast financial decisions, trading or otherwise. Sure you could improve with this game. But you don’t have to be able to make fast decisions to be successful in finance.
I feel the same, but I'm not intellectually convinced. You make up like half the ante in expectation on a random hand (on average dealt two cards of the goal suit, for 20 points against the ante of 40.)
If you can find 4 trades with a 5 point spread profit you'll make the rest of the ante back. That's a full minute for each trade, i.e. not that stressful.
What I do find stressful is how fast the bots react to obvious mispricings. If a player accidentally sells a card worth 8 points for 1 point the bots buy it before I even have a chance to see the offer! I could set a low limit bid on valuable suits to catch that, but the limits reset every time a trade happens, and I do not have the patience to enter the limit again. At least not on my phone -- might be easier on a computer with a real keyboard.
Reading articles like this I feel like I have an intellectual disability. I can't make heads or tails of what the point of these kinds of trading-simulacra card games are, or even how they work.
The game mechanics require 2 colors that each contain 2 suits. Playing cards fits this requirement, are widely available, and importantly everyone knows what the suits/colors are. The same isn't true if you used random companies or game characters.
Which is a good message that this type of role / career is not good for you. The excitement is in the winning, does not matter what is being traded as long as you win.
What’s the hyperbole? This is partly a recruiting tool. If you think the game is not exciting then this is probably not the career for you. Do you have something more substantive than a weak attack?
Which book? OP seems to be referencing _Going Infinite_ which is widely regarded as a bad take[1], while the card game you reference seems to be Liar's Poker, from Lewis' book of the same name.
The blog post linked in the top comment itself is very well written though. I had assumed poker was a good game to teach traders to play and the counterpoints were insightful.
> Upvote to comments ratio: nobody knows how to play, hadn't even heard before, but it has "nerdy corpo" attached to it, so must be good.
Correct, it’s the first trap us nerds make when corpos make “puzzles” to rope in future engineers to make lose their soul in immoral challenges like finance.
When the FAANG jobs boom fizzles over due to the shift to AI, we will see more engineers compromise to finance as a way to make FAANG level salaries.
We just don’t like to admit it, instead we like nerd games like this.
This is the finance recruitment marketing machine to entice future engineers to lose their soul to make obscene amounts of money doing the most morally bankrupt actions against humanity.
> Traders, private equity, hedge funds fall in this bucket.
How do you think the money in 401k, pension funds (government, teachers, etc.), S&P500, and any other financial instruments typically relied on by all sorts of average people grow? Do you think they appear out of thin air by the magic will of the market?
Or maybe there is some mechanism through which efficient price discovery happens in a way that benefits both the average people utilizing common investment vehicles and those who actively manage/administer those?
There is a difference between making staggeringly unhealthy amounts of money in days, than making money slowly over decades.
Traders do next to nothing and are able to acquire this relatively quickly and not give anything of value back.
If your idea of placing your money in a pension fund and locking it up for 40 years and only then you are 60+ years old able to use it a way of giving back to society.
Then you might as well say you’ve been scammed of your time slaving away only to enjoy that money when you have little time left.
Every employee with a pension is praying for their pensions to go up continuously for decades, traders can bet both ways of the market and still end up rich.
One recession and you’ll get a lot of disillusioned employees whose pensions are worth less than they put in years ago.
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.
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.
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.
There is a fantastic blog post by Ross Rheingans-Yoo about the shortcomings of poker as a tool to teach trading and why Figgie is a better one. https://blog.rossry.net/figgie/
He also wrote an equally brilliant eulogy about Max Chiswick, one of his colleagues, who helped him develop it. https://blog.rossry.net/chisness/
Beautiful eulogy. I don't know the author nor the eulogized but reading the eulogy made me appreciate people like those two (poker players, options traders, sports gamblers etc).
I often see in HN comments about how trading and Wall St in general is evil - when I feel completely the opposite. The two inventors of Figgie may not have contributed directly to curing cancer, saving the dolphins or the whales - dare I posit that most of tech building enterprise JIRA-esque todo-lists, e-commerce middleware and ad trackers don't either.
What I love about their friendship is that I see poker/gambler-mindset of always going for it, shoving the chips to the middle of the table when the pot-odds are good and it is a +EV play. I think they went all-in on several projects such as Figgie, AI Poker and teaching - seemingly all without the whole LinkedIn life coach-advised manner of building up your brand, client-base etc.
The older I get, I find more value too in the honesty of finance and trader types. Yes trading is about money but being honest about that is ironically one of the most altruistic things that can happen for a person. I find that most traders and gamblers who become aware of their greed and selfishness in their work - ironically also causes them to be very generous and selfless people in life due to their constant awareness of that limitation; and to also have zero fox given about what other people think of them professionally and socially (vs. in tech nowadays).
As an options trader/gambler, I'm thankful for the author's eulogy and their efforts in inventing the game. It's a bittersweet story. I read from the eulogy that Max Chiswick embraced the variance of life. Their friendship albeit short and sweet for me is like a fat right tail call option - the holding period might've only been a year and change - but the payoff is one that enriches the soul for life.
I often see in HN comments about how trading and Wall St in general is evil
Trading is one of the least evil things that goes on on Wall Street. Starting wars for profit (e.g., Blackwater) and buying additional houses as investments (as private equity firms do) and making massive job cuts while posting record profits, are all evil. I loathe capitalism but I agree that quants and traders are some of the least compromised people, whereas “change the world” techies and now techzis are the worst. Traders are, as you said, honest about their motivations.
Ultimately there is no ethical production or consumption in a system as rotten as ours, and everyone has to make a choice. Graveyards are full of moral people, and country clubs are full of humanity’s absolute worst. And if one has children, the argument can be made that failing to provide for them is ethically worse than taking a job within capitalism so long as one isn’t directly harming anyone.
Trading between members of our species is part of what puts humans on top; it's another form of collaboration and some other species do it to a degree, but nowhere near the level that we do.
But the evolution from trading x for y to trading x for y governed by z ie introducing fiat currency is the issue.
Lightning trades and trading in general that produces nothing of value is the issue. It goes deeper, with the wealthy able to lobby and keep tax havens legal but I don't expect anything to change so why say anything more on it.
price discovery of more assets will providing more liquidity and faster financing to cure cancer
so thats an easy rebuttal to keep in the back pocket
What if curing cancer needs education, applied intellect, and inspiration more than it needs "financing"?
No small number of examples of places with plenty of financiers that have said "aha, we need to have [thing X], let's [throw some money at it]" without much useful results because they don't actually have the necessary people, knowhow, networks, or institutions.
> What if curing cancer needs education, applied intellect, and inspiration more than it needs "financing"?
unlocking liquidity of currently hard to value assets will remove distractions for a broader set of people to get education, apply their intellect, and be inspired including to cure. many people are not applying their intellect because they are distracted by their illiquidity, basically all of their life.
> plenty of financiers that have said "aha, we need to have [thing X], let's [throw some money at it]" without much useful results
misallocated capital is a symptom of current market inefficiencies and has nothing to do with the concept of people working in finance versus whatever you prefer
To me both are beautiful. At risk of getting further tangential lol, microbiology and cancer genomics to me are beautiful competitions like trading between market participants (cancer cells vs immune cells).
What I'm trying to say is I don't buy the notion of humans "conquering" a disease or the virtue of somehow "elevating" ourselves beyond greed. We are just player-actors in both the beautiful cycle of life-and-death and the madness of crowds participating in markets of life (airbnb rental, dating, job, you name it). To pretend otherwise that somehow we can solve and tame uncertainty is -EV.
My god that eulogy post is a work of art. What incredible writing and what an incredible albeit brief friendship they had.
Worth noting the author's retraction of the figgie post mentioned, which he makes in the eulogy post:
"Put that way, I was (and am) convinced that my original post was arguing against a strawman . I had never actually played the kind of poker that would make a fair comparison!"
I play poker. It really takes thousands of hours to understand the game from a strategic point of view. Then when you have a few very good players, maybe you can start talking about psychology.
Any learning material you can recommend?
Real talk
Wow, that’s sad about Max Chiswick.
I was reading about him and his peculiar approach to eating only a couple of months ago.
May his work on poker live on.
His peculiar approach to eating??? Wow I need to hear about this. I’ll Google, but do you have any recommended articles?
https://chisness.substack.com/p/automate-the-food
Very sad. Max wrote about optimizing nutrition and cited a satire piece about over-optimization ruining someone's life. Then, ironically, he died from malaria while traveling—despite having donated to malaria prevention. Life defies our attempts to control it.
Is this satire or was he a conspiracy theorist? It didn’t take very long into the article before he started talking about “seed oil infiltration”.
My eyes rolled into the back of my head and I was unable to continue reading any more of the article after that
My impression is that he’s sincere, but that his writing is lighthearted and does “overplay” things for humorous effect. That said, I do think he’s opposed to seed oil. Not having looked into it much, I can’t judge whether he’s crazy or not. But even if he’s wrong, who among us _doesn’t_ have some conspiracy-ish views? I’ll go first: I think fruit juice and milk are not “health foods”, and more comparable to soda. We’ve been duped by Big Milk.
Plenty of agricultural subsidies there for sure, but milk and even fruit juice do provide some nutrients (besides sugar and water) so I think it might be overstating the case a little to lump them in with soda.
I don’t think they’re quite as bad as soda, but I do think they’re fairly close. I think this video is what first convinced me (been a long time since I watched, sorry if I’m wrong about small details): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hzyFZcuHmeI&pp=ygUWSGVhbHRoY2F...
I don’t think it requires conspiratorial thinking to believe that seed oils are less healthful than more traditional sources of cooking oils / fats (for one reason or another). Regardless of that, given that seed oils can be produced cheaply and incorporated in to foods to increase profit, “seed oil infiltration” into foods is very real.
It does require conspiratorial thinking because it’s a conspiracy theory.
It’s not a particularly old one either, it started showing up a year or two before Covid if I recall right.
You sound very confident and certain, about something which it is not possible yo be this certain about. How do we know with very high certainty that seed oils are not worse for us, say than olive oil?
I am certain in the same way that I am certain there is not a teapot in the same orbit as earth but conveniently on the opposite side of the sun so that it may never be observed.
The hullabaloo about seed oils showed up roughly 5-6 years ago, has no scientific backing beyond the level that gets you flat earthers and climate change deniers, and is now being touted by people like you as something I must be so confident doesn’t exist that now I have to be the one supplying evidence for the claim.
Add in the normal seed oil enthusiast tropes like Big Pharma and now it’s a conspiracy theory based on nebulous and unproven or actors conspiring against everyone who knows the simple answer of just getting rid of seed oils.
There’s a long history of producers making something unhealthy, and suppressing evidence it is unhealthy (cigarettes, corn syrup, milk formula, bacon, the list is quite long). It’s _not that remarkable_ if they’re doing the same thing here. I don’t believe the seed oil thing, this is my first time hearing about it; I just don’t think it’s hard to believe evidence about seed oil health could be suppressed. Given the long history of deceit in food products, I don’t think it’s crazy for people to ask for evidence in either direction.
The seed oil advocates are not asking for proof that a new substance is healthy before accepting is use. They took something that as existed for as long as humans have known you can crush seeds to get oil out of them, have actively harmful properties that they can explain.
They have no evidence and make active claims. If you want to join their side on that flimsy logic because it sounds mean or you don’t like big pharma then enjoy the company you keep
" I don’t think it’s crazy for people to ask for evidence in either direction."
That's literally the point of view that Russell's Teapot is demonstrating as fallacious. There needs to be evidence "for" something before you can argue its validity. Arguing for a statement with no evidence is easy, common, and unfortunately absolutely pointless.
Wow, just read through the eulogy and dug up some further links to explore, by Max Chiswick. Some really amazing content developed by these two, but never widely circulated.
https://aipokertutorial.com/
https://poker.camp/aipcs24/1kuhn_reading.html
In the other direction I like Skull as a pure bluff game without all the pot odds (there is still a bit of odds of course)
The cabal at Jane Street keeps getting dirtier and nastier. For those of us who happen to have known them from their ivy league days at MIT and Harvard on to predictably careers at JS, HRT or Five Rings, no surprises here.
They all 1)ran student clubs, often time starting their own if they had to, but couldn't care less about the mission or welfare of the group, just so it'd be show leadership skills. They all 2) swore allegiance to Effective Altruism mental without ever volunteering a minute to any worthy cause, most interestingly, 3)interbred only among themselves, possibly because they're too smart to associate with other students.
I find it amazing just how just a few firms on Wall Street seem to fish out all sorts of sociopaths right of ivy league grads. SBF(MIT), R-Yoo brothers (Harvard), happen to have made it to the news so far, but there are new generations coming right behind them - just look for Effective Altruism on their LinkedIn profile. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/24/business/ftx-sbf-modulo-c...
I've enjoyed playing this.
The basic strategy that works for me:
1. If I have an obvious skew in the distribution of cards I've been dealt, I can assume the common suit and hence the goal suit and try to buy the cards of that suit.
2. If the distribution of cards I have is more or less even, then I just save that round and try to make back the base cost.
The hard part has been trying to understand how to update my beliefs based on the trades being made. If you assume everyone is making the rational choice, you might be able to come up with some strategy, but if its against humans who might be trying to bluff, I have no idea. Although, they say its a win-win game, so maybe theres a way there too.
Another way of playing is just simple buy low sell high without considering the goal suit. The reward for this style of playing isn't as high as correctly deducing the goal suit, but it's adequately successful. I think this is similar to market making: no matter how the market moves, the market maker makes a small amount of money regardless.
Yup, that's what I mean by point #2.
A better strategy would be to estimate card value based on your starting hand (i.e., probability that each suit is goal suit). It requires some non-trivial combinatorics but I guess if you take the game seriously you just memorize those once. Then you buy cards if the price are lower than your estimate and sell if it is higher. You also should pay a somewhat more for the card that gives you majority (4th/5th).
The updates are in this case, at least assuming others are doing something similar, is to increase expected price if you see sell for higher price and reduce if you see the sell for lower price. To figure out how much to update would be the hard part.
Pretty much exactly what I meant.
This reminds me of how I got my first job in trading.
They had all the candidates going around doing various gimmicks like mental arithmetic. But one of the things we had to do was a trading game where you had to get a set of some commodity by trading your cards with other candidates. So just a screaming pit of kids trying to declare what they wanted to swap for.
I got dealt a ridiculously good hand, and all I had to do was wait for a couple of people to give me the missing two or three cards.
Once I started, poker was the game the bosses had us play. It seemed like a 10 quid subsidy from the head trader every day, I just had to wait around until he decided he'd played enough and went all in on what was always a crappy hand.
That essay about why poker probably isn't the best game for traders is pretty good btw. But there was a golden age of online poker going on at the time, and you could sit there with 5 tables open if you wanted.
I like the design of the game, having looked at it superficially. It's basically a market for cards, with what seems like a goal for collecting the right suit.
> But one of the things we had to do was a trading game where you had to get a set of some commodity by trading your cards with other candidates. So just a screaming pit of kids trying to declare what they wanted to swap for.
This is Pit, right? I remember it from an Aaron Brown book. Always wanted to try it!
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/140/pit
Yeah something like that. There wasn't time to explain anything complicated, just the basic "swap one card at a time with whoever, let me know when you have a set"
I downloaded the app to try it. It's interesting, appears that you can join a game with other players? I see two tabs: "4 starting" and "12 active" But clicking on these had no effect until suddenly the overflow broke rendering.
I am fascinated by this app mostly because it has a recruiting message at the bottom from Jane Street. I've never seen that before.
But, it's also interesting because it is one of the more poorly designed apps I've seen. It's react native when you check out the logs using adb. I bet this was a side project from a Jane Street employee. They did their best.
Interesting, works fine for me on both mobile and web. I am sure there are bugs in it but of the few games I played it worked fine though I imagine live is a much better experience when it comes to live bidding.
But overall this is a fairly common recruiting tool for firms like this, Jane Street is a definite outlier in how proactive they are but its not out of the norm for these this type of top tier org.
From the screenshots this is the kind of stuff that could have been a Web game.
Define web game? I played it in my browser.
I missed that, thought it was apps only.
Given that Jane Street's prowess is in OCaml, I'm more inclined to give them grace when trying to release a React Native app. RN is one of those languages/frameworks that is both very easy to get into and also incredibly difficult to make a polished app.
RN barely works even if you're an experienced JS dev.
Something is just messed up with it, maybe it's fixed now but 2 weeks ago I tried to build an Expo app and the default template just doesn't build on android. Known issue on GitHub.
Everything is jerryrigged together. Flutter is what RN should of been, but Google doesn't seem to really care about it. Why one company needs multi cross platform frameworks, with multiple languages... I'll never know.
React Native is easy to be tempted into using. It's clever in all the wrong ways, from opaquely ad hoc code transformations to a perennial flux of unfinished transitions between old and new designs for the same things; it's popular and from Facebook; it does its job well enough to convince many developers that malfunctions, bugs and general misery are either an accident or their fault, they just need to hack a little.
I agree about RN.
But not about flutter. I just used aider to code a brand new flutter app from scratch. It has Google login. And a webview on a second screen. It looks gorgeous and is performant. And deploying it to my android device from within the aider session worked flawlessly.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/01/google-lays-off-staff-from...
Google did a major cut to its flutter team last year. It's a great framework, I've used it for several projects. But I doubt it's future...
Ok, I'm glad you mentioned that you have used it in the past. I have not, have only done RN and plain Android using java and kotlin. Your comments are spot on. Thank you.
This game seems like it shouldn't work playing one-off games with no money on the line. How do you win in that context - by ending up with the most money at the end of the game? That would change the gameplay very significantly - a strategy that has you end with $1000 one time in three and 0 the rest should be favoured over one where you end up with $300 every time.
Poker solves this with poker tournaments: everyone starts with say $10,000 in play money and plays until one player wins it all. Backgammon solves it with match play: two players play first to say 7 points. In both cases, additional complexity is introduced to the game as optimal strategy changes depending on the size of the bets relative to the players' stacks or the number of points remaining.
Backgammon is just about playable as a one-off without a cube, though not by serious players. A single hand of poker without wagering makes no sense at all. Figgie seems closer to poker than backgammon, based on my reading. But it's being presented as a game to play one-off with bots or strangers. What am I missing?
I would bet that at Jane Street they absolutely do put money on the line when playing internally.
It's Jane Street. If two people haven't played this game for $10,000, I would be very surprised.
Their version of Liar's Poker.
You should play a lot of hands, or organise a tournament, for Figgie to really make sense. It's fun but I prefer to play in person.
How do you play in person? Are the cards for sale somewhere?
Just a normal deck is fine, you have to prepare it but it’s not a big deal.
I think that is kind of a big deal. You either need to prepare many identical decks in advance or come up with an elaborate selection procedure you repeat every 4 minutes.
I don't think it would be too hard. After the round players throw their cards in by suit face up to 4 piles, every suit gets topped up to 12 cards. Have one person take all four suits under the table and then hands them in random order to the dealer. The dealer randomizes them themselves so nobody can know which suit is which, then removes the required number of cards from the random suits and discards them, and shuffles the deck.
Obviously it isn't super quick, but once people know whats going on it doesn't take that long either.
Just switch dealers each round and have them sit out...
I assume this was originally played with normal decks, but the screenshots show special decks with only suits.
Doesn't this make a difference to gameplay? With normal suits, if you trade a few times, you may be able to establish that twelve distinct cards are in a suit even though you never saw more than say four of them at once
Maybe there typically isn't enough trading for this to make a difference? If there is, it does introduce an extra skill to the game of remembering the cards that have been seen before. That's valuable in lots of card games including some poker variants, but it doesn't seem like something JS would emphasize training.
If you have 12 identical decks you can turn them into 13 Figgie decks by combining all the cards of each value.
A single hand of poker without wagering makes no sense at all.
There are a lot of variations of poker. Playing single hands of, for example, five card draw makes sense without wagering.
That's true, but it's not very fun. A series of hands in which you determine how heavily to invest allows strategy to control for randomness. A single-hand five-card-draw showdown is a single decision about which cards to replace, and is largely determined by the shuffle, and the single bit of strategy "how many cards did the people before me ask for".
The whole choosing games thing is strange.
Give me one button and throw me into a live game.
Or let me practice against bots before going live.
Also the notice that my username was taken wasn’t clear (was in white) so i thought the app didn’t work until i learned my username was already taken by scrolling up and seeing the notice that didn’t stand out
I think it's because there's usually only a couple players at any given time, so live matching would never fill.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38679078
Love this. I’d really like to play with real cards, but the uneven suit setup makes that tough as a party game unless the host sits out. I guess you could prepare a bunch of decks ahead of time. At 4 minutes a round you’d need maybe 10 decks for an hour of playing though. To even it out I guess you’d have 12? But that means you’d have more info about what’s likely in later rounds..
Hmm. Maybe I can nerd snipe some into making a deck sorter..
Maybe you could just shuffle a full deck and then peel off 12 cards. Probably better simulates the stock market, there's a good chance somebody is going to get totally screwed (the case where the top of the deck is predominantly one suit). I wouldn't want to play for money that way, but playing for fake money maybe?
Sort the deck ino 4 stacks by suit, have somebody else remove the cards without looking at the suits, shuffle stacks back into a deck.
Yes. I think you’d want half the players to watch the stack placement and half the removal and rearrangement. Lots of incentive to peek.
I get that Diplomacy feeling where if you pull off cheating, good, it's part of the game. Like insider trading, or when I'd play the banker in monopoly and sleight-of-hand. Ledgerdemain, if you will
I'd rather play with cards as well.
You can easily set up the cards with two honest Players. Player 1 sorts and makes four piles S-C--H-D. Player 1 looks away, Player 2 puts 8/12 markers randomly on either the first two piles or the last two piles, then randomizes the piles (so Player 1 gets no information from the order).
The hard part is how to do the trading with real cards. You would have to structure/limit the trading a lot instead of the free-for-all that seems to be going on.
1. Grab at least 4 cards of each suit
2. Sort them to follow a repeating pattern of 4 distinct suits, e.g. ♥♦♣♠♥♦♣♠♥♦♣♠...
2. Cut the deck, putting the top part under the bottom part
3. (The deck will still have that pattern, but shifted by an unknown amount)
4. Counting out from the top, remove the following cards:
- 1st, 5th, 9th, 13th
- 2nd, 6th
- 3rd, 7th
Or: take 3, skip 1, take 3, skip 1, take 1, skip 3, take 1
Each of these groups will be of the same suit, so the deck should have the figgy distribution.
That is a much cleverer solution than I thought up using two different people to randomize the set of 4 suits against each other to prevent peeks.
I guess either works though. For speed you would likely want the players to help either sort by suit or sort by a 4 suit pattern.
This sounds like the most annoying possible way to play a game that is expected to be done a dozen times per hour.
or sort them into piles and have people shuffle the piles?
I should've clarified that, but I wanted to find out how to do it as a single person.
Person 1 enters the room, makes a bunch of decks and puts them in boxes. Leaves the room.
Person 2 enters the room, shuffles the boxes, leaves the room.
Person 1 re-enters the room and picks a box.
Person 1 made every deck exactly the same way though.
I guess Person 2 could run some simple validations of what Person 1 initially did.
Then again, Person 2 could have also replaced all of Person 1s decks with their own.
Person 1 would make exactly one of each possibility. They're just deciding which cards go in which pile/box.
make a bunch of decks from identical standard decks (all blue or all red) and then just mix up the boxes?
For in-person play with ordinary playing cards and an arbitrary number of players, keep the rules the same except:
* Start with 1 deck per each 2 players. Shuffle the decks together.
* Deal 10 cards to each player, & set ante at a constant 50 chips per player.
* At the end-of-round reveal, the common suit is whichever suit has the most cards. If there's a tie, flip cards from the remaining deck until the tie is broken and the common suit is determined.
I looked at this. I don’t fully understand the game yet. One thing I do not like is the emphasis of speed. Humans should not be making fast financial decisions, trading or otherwise. Sure you could improve with this game. But you don’t have to be able to make fast decisions to be successful in finance.
I feel the same, but I'm not intellectually convinced. You make up like half the ante in expectation on a random hand (on average dealt two cards of the goal suit, for 20 points against the ante of 40.)
If you can find 4 trades with a 5 point spread profit you'll make the rest of the ante back. That's a full minute for each trade, i.e. not that stressful.
What I do find stressful is how fast the bots react to obvious mispricings. If a player accidentally sells a card worth 8 points for 1 point the bots buy it before I even have a chance to see the offer! I could set a low limit bid on valuable suits to catch that, but the limits reset every time a trade happens, and I do not have the patience to enter the limit again. At least not on my phone -- might be easier on a computer with a real keyboard.
Just like real trading :')
Reading articles like this I feel like I have an intellectual disability. I can't make heads or tails of what the point of these kinds of trading-simulacra card games are, or even how they work.
Why not use your own characters or companies to trade?
Would be way more fun having some mascots to trade instead of common cards
The game mechanics require 2 colors that each contain 2 suits. Playing cards fits this requirement, are widely available, and importantly everyone knows what the suits/colors are. The same isn't true if you used random companies or game characters.
Which is a good message that this type of role / career is not good for you. The excitement is in the winning, does not matter what is being traded as long as you win.
lol hyperbole much.
What’s the hyperbole? This is partly a recruiting tool. If you think the game is not exciting then this is probably not the career for you. Do you have something more substantive than a weak attack?
Do people experience the frequent loss of part of the trading history when reviewing at round end on the browser version?
just curious , if anyone knows —
is this the same game played by FTX sam in that Michael Lewis crypto biopic ??
I've not watched FTX's biopic - I think it's one Michael got wrong. But Michael Lewis is a Liar's Poker fan from his days at Salomon.
what do you think he got wrong (in general or particularly) ??
not saying it was my favorite book but i did enjoy michael lewis’ description of the card game & such
Which book? OP seems to be referencing _Going Infinite_ which is widely regarded as a bad take[1], while the card game you reference seems to be Liar's Poker, from Lewis' book of the same name.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_Infinite#Reception
Saddaow
[dead]
Upvote to comments ratio: nobody knows how to play, hadn't even heard before, but it has "nerdy corpo" attached to it, so must be good.
The blog post linked in the top comment itself is very well written though. I had assumed poker was a good game to teach traders to play and the counterpoints were insightful.
Projection?
What exactly is being projected, and from where onto what?
> Upvote to comments ratio: nobody knows how to play, hadn't even heard before, but it has "nerdy corpo" attached to it, so must be good.
Correct, it’s the first trap us nerds make when corpos make “puzzles” to rope in future engineers to make lose their soul in immoral challenges like finance.
When the FAANG jobs boom fizzles over due to the shift to AI, we will see more engineers compromise to finance as a way to make FAANG level salaries.
We just don’t like to admit it, instead we like nerd games like this.
This is the finance recruitment marketing machine to entice future engineers to lose their soul to make obscene amounts of money doing the most morally bankrupt actions against humanity.
hows quantitative finance more morally bankrupt than being an engineer in oil/gas, defense industry, etc.
Or data harvesting, or making games with addictive micro transactions, or…most industries.
Most industries don't make billions of dollars betting on the demise of other industries and also not giving anything back to society.
Traders, private equity, hedge funds fall in this bucket.
> not giving anything back to society.
> Traders, private equity, hedge funds fall in this bucket.
How do you think the money in 401k, pension funds (government, teachers, etc.), S&P500, and any other financial instruments typically relied on by all sorts of average people grow? Do you think they appear out of thin air by the magic will of the market?
Or maybe there is some mechanism through which efficient price discovery happens in a way that benefits both the average people utilizing common investment vehicles and those who actively manage/administer those?
And?
There is a difference between making staggeringly unhealthy amounts of money in days, than making money slowly over decades.
Traders do next to nothing and are able to acquire this relatively quickly and not give anything of value back.
If your idea of placing your money in a pension fund and locking it up for 40 years and only then you are 60+ years old able to use it a way of giving back to society.
Then you might as well say you’ve been scammed of your time slaving away only to enjoy that money when you have little time left.
Every employee with a pension is praying for their pensions to go up continuously for decades, traders can bet both ways of the market and still end up rich.
One recession and you’ll get a lot of disillusioned employees whose pensions are worth less than they put in years ago.
81877778ssal
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.
> trading just doesn’t make sense to me
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.
You're still missing the point, by a long shot.
You get a tumor, a surgeon removes it.
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.
> You get a tumor, a surgeon removes 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.
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.
> trading just doesn’t make sense to me.
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.
now does it make sense?
> now does it make sense?
no.
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.