The alternative to highly technical, agile quantitative trading is fat middle men, wide spreads, and capital sitting in 8%* stupider places than it would otherwise. That’s a pretty big deal even if the observable effects are extremely diffuse.
* Made up number, but if we woke up on Monday with nothing but the tech we used to trade in 1984 it would probably hit much worse.
The inverse is true too: lots of things provide value that no one pays for.
I find it shocking that anyone that programs would think this way considering how widespread and common open source tooling is. I don't know how you can get through your day without using OSS or even free websites like stack overflow.
But generally nobody pays quants to lose money. They expect value over the other opportunities they have to use that same money.
Is this really controversial?
As with your other comment, this has nothing to do with what the original parent comment was remarking on. They didn't claim, nor did anyone else, that proprietary trading firms weren't making money and that people weren't well compensated due to helping firms make money. Their remark was that the value these firms are providing to society is questionable and that the highly intelligent employees could likely be providing greater value to society elsewhere.
But you are conflating money and value. As you stated, raising children produces value, and as you imply, this is not generating revenue. Which you are also conflating exchanging money with generating value. Sure, liquidity can generate value but don't confuse these things.
People seem to be forgetting that money is a proxy and that a proxy is not the same as the thing you are proxying.
I'd argue that pulling these people out of moving society forward is just another form of externalized cost. The stanford guy who figured out how to halve the cost of solar in 2012 never got to realize it because $750k/yr to do stochastic modeling of cattle feed to (secretly) overcharge farmers for futures contracts was just too enticing.
Now, most of this money is going to HFT shops, but you could also make an argument that some of it stays with the investors, since spreads are much smaller now.
There is 0 cost to society, maybe even a small gain.
As for moving society forward, I don't know. If not in finance, most of these guys would work for big tech companies trying to actively make kids and adults addicted to screens.
Liken it to the government deciding to spend 40% of the budget on roads. Suddenly the roads quickly get pot holes filled, the lines are seemingly always freshly painted, cracks are all filled, and even mildly uneven roads gets freshly paved.
The first order effects of this would all be positive. The transportation dept. could talk all day about benefits to everyone. Everyone would love the great roads.
But spending 40% of the budget on roads is insane, and the second and third order effects would be disastrous to that society.
In a separate single example, it's fairly easy to point out what's the right thing to do - as you do with your Stanford guy example. However, history show us that it usually turns out to be disastrous in the long term. Maybe this Stanford guy will make several millions $, and then go back to desiging how to produce those half price solars at scale.
No, this would be the alternative to securities and derivatives markets being electronic.
>If it didn’t provide value, nobody would pay for it.
The parent was remarking on the value provided to society, not the value provided to the firms.