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The 'zero-sum game' part is meaningless and adds no insight here. It doesn't matter whether you believe trading/gambling is zero-sum or not. For instance, imag
by joosters 11y ago
The 'zero-sum game' part is meaningless and adds no insight here. It doesn't matter whether you believe trading/gambling is zero-sum or not.
For instance, imagine you have a poker-playing bot at a poker table, where the house takes no cut of the stakes. Zero-sum? Yes. But your bot has to be better than the other players, and win more than its running costs in order to profit. Now imagine the same situation but the house does take a cut. Zero-sum? Not any more. But your bot still has to be better than the other players and its running costs in order to profit. The house 'rake' just increases your operating costs.
I think you are confusing the issue with large scale HFT (where companies pay more and more for slightly faster comms), which is a world away from the trading strategies the article is talking about.
- SonicSoul 11y agoThink you missed the point. All he was saying (I believe) that no matter how good your models are it's still a race between the players to get the biggest share of the pot. The more players the less chance you have
- joosters 11y agoThat's true of many endeavors, and is unrelated to any 'zero-sum' argument.
- jsprogrammer 11y agoAnother way to look at your 'profit' is just as an increase in the operating costs of all the other players and the house. I think the zero-sum part implies that this type of trading is not actually productive. At this point, it is literally just modifying numbers represented as fluctuations in local electro-magnetic fields instead of something useful like carrying spices from one continent to another.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- fluidcruft 11y agoThat's the logic suckers use when buying bitcoin mining hardware.