51–60 of 216 posts
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Most ad-blockers are non-profits, how does that fit in your picture?
Sorry, what have ad-blockers got to do with biotech?
Ad blockers are not products of tech companies but enthusiasts, as I understand it.
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As someone who has worked in the industry, I've yet to see any compelling argument that high frequency quants are making any meaningful contribution to society. Maybe on the low frequency end, but slightly higher market liquidity doesn't serve that large a social good imo.
High frequency quants almost certainly don't directly provide a massive social good, but they're one of the many facilitators enabling the smooth functioning of markets that do. But FWIW, the comment I was replying didn't seem to be specifically critical of high frequency quants. Dismissing the entire field as something that doesn't contribute to society is beyond absurd.
There is no value in pure finance.
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All I think when I see this is "this intelligence wasted on finance and ads." Can you imagine human potential if it was somehow applied to crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines, etc? Not everything has to be perfectly efficient but it just saddens me to see all these great minds doing what, adversarially harvesting margin from the works of others?
The smartest people are going from Harvard et.al. into finance, adtech, investment banking, wallstreet. What they could achieve in spending their attention on real problem would be massive.
Of course the suspicion towards this is eternal. People always hated the traders as opposed to the farmers. But trade is crucial. And it relies on estimating what value things have and rewards correcting over the incorrect beliefs of uninformed people. This kind of information based knowledge work was always disliked by most people as it seems lazy. And for sure there are zero sum and rent seeking aspects or insider trading etc. But it's not so simple as to say that all investment and finance jobs are negative and working on farm efficiency is always better.
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All I think when I see this is "this intelligence wasted on finance and ads." Can you imagine human potential if it was somehow applied to crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines, etc? Not everything has to be perfectly efficient but it just saddens me to see all these great minds doing what, adversarially harvesting margin from the works of others?
[stub for offtopicness]
All I think when I see this is "this intelligence wasted on finance and ads." Can you imagine human potential if it was somehow applied to crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines, etc? Not everything has to be perfectly efficient but it just saddens me to see all these great minds doing what, adversarially harvesting margin from the works of others?
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We let the market dictate how society's resources are allocated. And we see, as a result, how the market is actually not at all interested in the satisfaction and well-being of the people in society.
>the market is actually not at all interested in the satisfaction and well-being of the people in society. The biochem industry is extremely bad at creating things that increase the satisfaction and well-being of society; the vast majority of products are failures with few users. The reason tech companies make money is because they make things people actually want to use.
I'd argue the "satisfaction" of society has been hijacked. We cannot even, as a society, understand the impact on medicine, nutrition, agriculture and the well-being we could harness from focusing on the long term, rather than seeking dopamine hits through screens.
I blame Moloch. https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch
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The smartest people are going from Harvard et.al. into finance, adtech, investment banking, wallstreet. What they could achieve in spending their attention on real problem would be massive.
Finance and investment banking is about resource allocation. To get the stuff like agriculture innovation etc done, you need money. You need someone to look and say, this is worth investing money in. This is far from trivial. The investment firms try to predict what technology or company is going to make something profitable. This allocation task is very important. There are many ways to fail at producing anything us…
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All I think when I see this is "this intelligence wasted on finance and ads." Can you imagine human potential if it was somehow applied to crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines, etc? Not everything has to be perfectly efficient but it just saddens me to see all these great minds doing what, adversarially harvesting margin from the works of others?
We already have very efficient crop harvesting and Eli Lilly is nearly a $1 Trillion dollar company. Interestingly, the new medicine is designed to keep us from eating so many cheap calories (new weight loss drugs).
> Not everything has to be perfectly efficient but it just saddens me to see all these great minds doing what, adversarially harvesting margin from the works of others?
The traders and investors who work in this space also go to where they are need, aka where the big money is. So few of these folks are trading corn and soybeans, though some do, rather most are trading drug stocks, tech stocks, and recently sovereign debt related trading (e.g. things like gold and bonds). The focus is around the big questions of our time, like "Are AI investments going to pay off?", or "Is the US going to default/soft default?", and so on.
Deciding how a society allocates its resources, or places its bets, is an important function. Otherwise, you end up with planned economies by disconnected leaders, which often leads to massive failures and large social consequences. Unfortunately, the US is trending in that direction to some degree with it's giant fiscal deficits, tariffs, and tribal politics creeping into economic policy. Nevertheless, traders will weigh these outcomes in their trades, and you'll see a quick reflection from any major change in policy almost immediately, which is a helpful feedback mechanism. For example, the tariff tantrums caused by trump proposing 100%+ china tariffs where he crashed the markets last spring, leading to a moderation in policy.
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We let the market dictate how society's resources are allocated. And we see, as a result, how the market is actually not at all interested in the satisfaction and well-being of the people in society.
>the market is actually not at all interested in the satisfaction and well-being of the people in society. The biochem industry is extremely bad at creating things that increase the satisfaction and well-being of society; the vast majority of products are failures with few users. The reason tech companies make money is because they make things people actually want to use.
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Yeah I saw something fly by on my feed that they were responsible for big btc dumps https://x.com/1914ad/status/2026757796390449382 Haven't read it yet but seems spicey
> Bitcoin should be at least $150,000 right now and everyone knows it.
Based on what? I'm a fan of Bitcoin, but "should be" is utter nonsense. As is "everyone knows it". HN doesn't, for one.
> Every trading day at 10am Eastern, coinciding with the U.S. stock market open, Bitcoin experienced sudden and sharp sell-offs. The drops were precise, algorithmic, and wildly disproportionate to broader market conditions. They wiped out leveraged long positions, triggered cascading liquidations, and then reversed within hours.
> [...] This happened every day, day after day.
If these swings are so predictable, why isn't everyone else getting wildly rich off them at the expense of Jane Street?
> Selling into thin order books at the open would depress the price, trigger liquidation cascades among leveraged traders, and create buying opportunities at lower levels. The firm could then re-enter at the bottom of a move it had manufactured.
Yea well don't be overlevered on Bitcoin I guess?
> Simultaneously, the firm boosted its holdings of MicroStrategy stock by 473%, accumulating 951,187 shares worth roughly $121 million
> Basically, Jane Street has direct access to the pipe that connects the Bitcoin ETF to actual Bitcoin, and almost nobody else does.
You too can buy and sell MSTR and BTC.
> In either scenario, the firm has every incentive to use its privileged position as authorized participant to suppress the spot price, trigger liquidations, and harvest the spread.
Yea well don't be overlevered on Bitcoin I guess?
> In other words, the 21M cap only works if the market sitting on top of it is honest.
No. Hell no.
> It has been accused of running algorithmic sell programs that suppressed Bitcoin's price for months.
Cheap Bitcoin sponsored by Jane Street. Cry me a river.