alt Hacker NewsKind of reads 25 people's stories about "How I became a parasite". Why not create new things, instead of making a career out of leeching the wealth created by others?
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Why not practice compassion instead of critiquing others?
Everyone benefits with more efficient markets.
It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking HFT/low frequency quant firms "leech wealth".
You can get out of the trap by learning about what they do and the essential role they play in the proper functioning of our markets.
the leeches are the publicly traded companies that are listed on the stock market. Any market should be happy to have more participants, unless you like price-uncertainty.
Said on a website hosted by a major VC that specializes in Silicon Valley types of venture capital, bringing the next data collecting mobile app to your doorstep.
Did you actually read them?
I didn't go to NYC, but Money is fungible so it's a simple math problem.
How much non-parasite good can you do making $50k/year * 10 years? Even if we ignore taxes and you donated your entire salary, that tops out at $500k worth. If instead you could make, say, $500k/year * 10 years, and then quit and form your own non-profit for $2,000,000 and do 4x as much good.
This isn’t really a good angle to critique finance IMO, because it is indeed a necessary part of the modern economy.
A better angle is how finance tends to acquire a ton of smart young people that could/would otherwise be doing work that has more benefits to society. It’s hard to blame the individual here, because the salaries are orders of magnitude larger in finance vs. say, aerospace engineering. Would I turn down $700k at a hedge fund to earn $90k at a science lab? Probably not, unless I was already independently wealthy.