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Comment by SQueeeeeL | Hacker News Reader

Most people are pretty behind the curve on the fact that stock trading is essentially elaborate betting on horse races, but sports betting doesn't have such skewed optics

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That's only when the poor people do it, when VCs/ banks / hedge funds do it they are stewards of future innovation and macroeconomy efficiency experts, guiding our economy towards the activity that returns socially beneficial results.

> Most people are pretty behind the curve on the fact that stock trading is essentially elaborate betting on horse races

If your drug of choice is deep-OTM weekly options, it suddenly becomes straight up gambling.

Trading is obviously different from investing. Horse racing has no such comparable as an S&P 500 index fund that will produce solid returns over a very long period of time (such that you can safely allocate N% of your income to it over a lifetime and can expect to do well).

I am certain you just inspired someone to start the first horse race index fund in which fund managers invest diversify by placing low- to moderate-risk bets at horse races around the world.

You can buy fractional ownership in horses as an investment. Buying across a bunch of different horses would effectively be creating your own index.

I think we should ban all stock transactions that aren't simply buying or selling shares for personal possession. Calls/puts, options, futures, etc. are just bets that are less complicated for corporate investment banks to automate strategies than for individual retail investors, leading to an obvious power and information imbalance that guarantees that the "house" always wins.

futures have very legitimate use for producers and consumers of commodities. speculators then provide them liquidity

but say, people blowing out accounts trading emini sp500 while having no idea what a futures contract is, sure why not

Producers and consumers can provide their own damn liquidity. It's called "budgeting".

This seems to be an explanation ex post facto and not a reason for its genesis. This insane liquidity generation scheme is one of many expressions of the force that drives unbridled exponential growth, which we can now see is in excess of what our environment writ large can sustainably provide.

The pursuit of short term money-on-money returns is eating the world, and sycophants who personally benefit are turning blind eyes to this very basic and obvious fact.

Derivatives have a purpose and closing off regular people is just more gate keeping.

Horses competing or Humans competing, what's the difference?

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