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Comment by asdkjasdkj | Hacker News Reader

This level of defeatism is the exact reason I got into the markets algo trading.

People like you stay out.

More to the point, just because a genius mathematician and code breaker started a hedge fund it doesn't at all push out any of the little guys. The market is so large he can't possibly be trading all instruments at once, and "scaling" is a problem for huge hedge funds. Especially ones that have to answer to their shareholders. Even though this is a huge fund, it is highly inflexible.

What you're saying is akin to "Google already does email and they're loaded with geniuses, what makes you think you have an edge over that?"

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In fairness, if someone told me they were going to make a killing on free webmail supported by ads and data mining, I think "How on earth do you intend to complete with Google?" would be a perfectly legitimate question.

In fairness, by that logic nothing would ever get done. Microsoft? You're never going to win over IBM. Xerox? You'll always be ancillary to Kodak. GM? Ford is already there. The Fugger's Banking company? Good luck against the Venetians and the Florentines. Same old story. At the end of the day, you either try something new or you don't.

> In fairness, by that logic nothing would ever get done.

Or it will get done by people who have thought long and hard about how they are going to compete with the giants, rather than someone naïve sap.

The fact that the question is being asked does not imply that there are no good answers to it, but it is unlikely that someone who hasn't spent time considering how to improve on the incumbents is going to beat them.

Indeed, but nobody (I certainly wasn't) was advocating to not do your homework and evaluate your risk. Sometimes, however, things just happen, for example James Simons stumbled upon the industry by chance. How many companies were motivated by killer instinct? Did Gates want to kill IBM? Did Xerox plan to kill Kodak (they didn't but they serendipitously started a revolution)?

Only if they don't have a good answer to the question.

Dropbox vs OneDrive or Google Drive could be a better example here.

Comparative advantage. Even if they're absolutely better than you at every possible strategy, there are still going to be opportunities in markets that it isn't worth their time to invest in.

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