Kind of unrelated but I would like to have HN opinion: what is the actual point in working as a trader ? At the end of the day you just made more money or lost money. But you’re not contributing in anything for the world. I really don’t understand why people are happy to say they are trader when at the end it seems that the only do it for money.
In 40 years when I look back I don’t personally want to see that I worked for 20 years for a company just to make money, rather I would like to say for example: I built this product which helped some people
I sleep better working in HFT than working in regular tech
HFT, at worst, adds exactly zero value to society. I don't buy into the memes of "we provide liquidity!" or "we make markets efficient!" being some noble mission. But HFT certainly does no harm
Regular tech ultimately just pushes ads or products on people, which I consider poisonous to society
Because you like to know something that other people don't know and won't publish.
Or you don't worry about contributing to the world.
Or you enjoy intellectual entertainment above what you might add to society.
For some reason this type of comment comes up quite often on algo trading threads. Keep in mind most people are not deciding on their careers based on what they contribute to the world.
I'm not saying that everyone trading has idealistic, altruistic reasons for doing so, but products are built on the back of capital markets.
At least ideally, successful trading makes markets more efficient, and making markets more efficient ripples out making it easier for many people to make many products that create value for their users.
Even if all of that is true though, it's an unnatural framing for people to work with and is much harder to find existential meaning in abstract changes to the system that make people's lives better in complex and hard to trace ways than it is to find meaning in a direct value proposition to your users.
View the markets as a mechanism for prioritizing resources. Better resource prioritization increases prosperity, which benefits a great number of people. Traders who reliably improve pricing increase world prosperity. Traders who are unable to improve pricing tend to not last long. Traders who worsen pricing by trickery are economic parasites who run considerable risk of being punished by an exchange or regulatory agency.
TLDR, for people like you and me, who want to do useful things that help people, money can be very useful for that.
For an extreme version, look up Effective Altrusim. Some argue that the best way you can help others in this world, is to earn as much as possible (for example at a trading desk) and then give all your surplus earnings to the most charitable causes.
Personally, I would like to earn money so that I can work on projects that I think are worth doing and have a chance of using my particular skills and drives to good effect.
For example, I feel ready to take open hardware to a new level by building a small-scale chip (IC) factory capable of manufacturing open source designs (or any designs) at a realistic cost for customisation. And that's just one step in a series of related things, each of which will contribute something to the world if they are successful. That's just an example: Other people have their own grand projects they think are worthwhile.
But that venture is both challenging and expensive, and I'm still paying off debts from the last failed bootstrap. So my next big project is paused, until I have earned enough to be able to bootstrap all over again.
Something like HFT would be rather useful at providing the money, and its on my list of things to explore in the short term, because it's also a good match for my experience in several areas. But it's not something I'd want to do for a long time for its own sake. It would be for the money, so that I can do other useful things down the line.
> But you’re not contributing in anything for the world.
The role of capital markets is (among others) to integrate all available information from the real world into a price. A trader does this (for example) by studying company financials, their corporate strategy, expectations for the performance of their products and then buying or selling stock if the current price does not reflect this information. In a capitalist economy capital market serve as the major signal on the performance (another word for efficiency) of a company.
