> but its useless as far as i can tell, That's because you, as well as 99% of people accusing financial firms of being useless, don't know what you're talking

> but its useless as far as i can tell, That's because you, as well as 99% of people accusing financial firms of being useless, don't know what you're talking about. One of the reasons planned economies usually fail quite spectacularly is that individuals are very bad at predicting global market behavior. It's too complicated. Local stochastic optimization (free market economies) works quite well, even if it's maybe not globally optimal; doing better than free markets via central planning requires an unfeasible level of omniscience about all market actors and interactions. This refrain of "traders do nothing useful" is a great example of that; most people are too myopic and/or economically illiterate to see otherwise. Here's what traders do; they communicate price information (extremely important) and charge a small commission for doing so. In the absence of regulation on "Wall Street" (or whatever your regional synechdoche), there would be more competition among people communicating price information and profit margins would probably be a lot smaller. If you can do a better job communicating price information (possibly by predicting future prices), you can make more money. Another auxiliary job that traders do is provide liquidity, which is very important but (in my opinion) less important than the first. My apologies for being a bit blunt, but I think people deserve a bit of admonition for attacking that which they clearly don't understand enough to even criticize coherently.