11 ms·

As a counterpoint I work in finance and work with a group of smart people that all check their egos in at the door. It's a great place to work. We also try to t

As a counterpoint I work in finance and work with a group of smart people that all check their egos in at the door. It's a great place to work. We also try to turn money into more money, it's pretty much the game of life whether you play it or not. It pays really well so I can't complain. Is the job fulfilling? Depends on your goals - for me I've gained a huge knowledge of low level programming, and front line experience on how far one can go with both software and hardware to 'win' against other competitors in the space. That's invaluable stuff for me. Is the job moral? Anyone who puts their money on the line knows the risks, this isn't stealing from the poor. People who invest must understand risk, and risk is really the only way things move forward in the first place. But it also implies there can and will be people who lose out.

sigi45 8y ago
Win against whom? People with less knowledge. Less technology. There should not be an additional layer of risk involved only because people bet on other people. If I buy a share from company x, the success of that company should represent the share price. But that is partially true. And NO enough people have no idea what they are doing. In Germany we increased the requirements for trading. You have to read stuff and sign off otherwise the bank will not allow you to buy certain products. Is the job moral? No.
- quanticle 8y ago
  In Germany we increased the requirements for trading. You have to read stuff and sign off otherwise the bank will not allow you to buy certain products. We have that in the US too. While ordinary "retail" investors can buy stocks and bonds (which they can do in Germany too, I presume), most of the "exotic" products that people complain about are restricted to "accredited" investors. In order to be an accredited investor in the US, you have to be one of the following: - a bank, insurance company, registered investment company, business development company, or small business investment company - an employee benefit plan, within the meaning of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, if a bank, insurance company or registered investment adviser makes the investment decisions, or if the plan has total assets in excess of 5,000,000 dollars - a charitable organization, corporation, or partnership with assets exceeding 5,000,000 dollars - a director, general officer, or partner of the company selling the securities - a business in which all the equity owners are accredited investors - a natural person who has individual net worth or joint net worth with the person's spouse that exceeds 1,000,000 dollars at the time of purchase or has assets under management of 1,000,000 dollars or above, excluding the value of the individual's primary residence - a natural person with income exceeding 200,000 dollars per year in each of the two most recent years or joint income with a spouse exceeding 300,000 dollars per year in those years and a reasonable expectation of the same income level for the current year - a trust with assets in excess of 5,000,000 dollars not formed to acquire the securities offered whose purchases a sophisticated person makes So as you can see, there are already quite stringent requirements for trading most "exotic" derivatives in the US. You either have to be a millionaire, have the backing of an institution, have government certification or all of the above in order to trade things like mortgage-backed securities and government bonds. I have zero ethical qualms about winning when I know that the other people I'm competing against are millionaires, have institutional backing, have government approval or all of the above.
  - olau 8y ago
    I think the point was that having smart people participate is wasting their time when they could be doing something more productive, not who is losing. Like for instance work on robotic arms so we can all have a household robot to do the house chores.
    - lallysingh 8y ago
      I could argue the same about physicists not working on FTL. Or medical research on non-life threatening diseases. It's a bit unfair.
      - wpietri 8y ago
        Medical research on non-life-threatening things is still creating value for people with less-than-fatal problems. Physicists working on physics research might be a problem if those physicists could just divert money elsewhere in the economy into their own research programs. As it is, there's a complex system of controls so that public research money is generally used for some reasonably good purpose.
  - lewilewilewi 8y ago
    Cool, so my measly pension is invested in a pension fund (as it has to be, legally). The pension fund managers then buy some exotics, which gives me exposure to the same exotics. then something bad happens, such as 2008, and I lose my future. Thanks guys, the stringent requirements really worked in my favour there!
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  > People with less knowledge. Less technology. One of my observations, to make a living you need an angle. This isn't necessarily 'bad'. A mechanic has years of experience and tools, and a lift. In return for parting with cash he'll do something for you (hopefully). Trading houses use their angle to do something to you, namely siphon off some of your money without providing you anything.
4ff6f7fd26e 8y ago
> Anyone who puts their money on the line knows the risks, this isn't stealing from the poor. The problem here is that, for example, at least in the US, not everyone with a pension or who "contibutes" to a retirement plan is comfortable or even aware of the risks. That ignorance is not a defense, per-se, but if you've got blinders on that you're fleecing pennies off the already rich you are sorely mistaken. I'd go so far as to argue that turning money into more money without providing a good or service in exchange is squarely immoral.
- Novashi 8y ago
  The service in this case is facilitating a trade. Liquidity is important, but I think it was oversold to pull some of the PR heat off of HFT. Especially since a lot of retail investing advice has turned to index funds, liquidity for individual stocks matters less for them -- it also means they don't have to understand as much financial info before investing (just read the index's prospectus every year vs. reading a whole bunch of company financial filings every quarter).
- attende_domine 8y ago
  C. S. Lewis on interest (from Mere Christianity): >There is one bit of advice given to us by the ancient heathen Greeks, and by the Jews in the Old Testament, and by the great Christian teachers of the Middle Ages, which the modern economic system has completely disobeyed. All these people told us not to lend money at interest: and lending money at interest — what we call investment — is the basis of our whole system. Now it may not absolutely follow that we are wrong. Some people say that when Moses and Aristotle and the Christians agreed in forbidding interest (or “usury” as they called it), they could not foresee the joint stock company, and were only dunking of the private moneylender, and that, therefore, we need not bother about what they said. >That is a question I cannot decide on. I am not an economist and I simply do not know whether the investment system is responsible for the state we are in or not. This is where we want the Christian economist. But I should not have been honest if I had not told you that three great civilizations had agreed (or so it seems at first sight) in condemning the very thing on which we have based our whole life.
  - 8y ago
exikyut 8y ago
> I've gained a huge knowledge of low level programming This is really interesting. I'm at least passingly aware about high speed/frequency trading, but don't know much about the topic in depth. How low is low in this field? I'm picturing RTOSes running AVX512-heavy hand-optimized code, FPGA farms, custom network ASICs... how overly optimistic am I being here? Heh Of course, such a vision is very lop-sided, since HFT depends heavily on high-level intelligence. So perhaps it's realtime(ish) Linux and lots of GPUs.
- mverwijs 8y ago
  Not realtime, because that only enforces 'precision', not low latency per se. When I was working in this field, 2008-2011, there were guys doing fpgas, custom tcp/ip stacks, custom network drivers, dedicated networks and network cards for exchange data coming in and for going out. Mostly linux. Hardware and lowlevel fun. Allthough the fastest trades were always done by this one catalonian guy using Windows and .NET. I kid you not. Good times. Soulless. But good.
  - exikyut 8y ago
    How does realtime enforce precision and not latency? I was referring to hard realtime. And wow, so I wasn't too far off the mark. FPGAs and exotic networking. Huh. I remember reading a story about a trading floor running on SQL Server, which was doing continuous throughput of 6000 queries/second. I didn't know enough at the time to discern what percentage of that was writes, but I think the point may have been that it was all of it. This was quite a few years ago. So perhaps Windows isn't actually the slowe{st,r} system out there for certain tasks.
    - mverwijs 8y ago
      As I've always understood (but I'm no RTOS expert) is that RTOS does not guarantee LOWER latency. It guarantees A latency. But again: not an RTOS expert. We had a lab that would constantly test configurations of hardware and software. And I remember them finding RTOS not being helpful.
ahallan 8y ago
I've tried to grapple with this notion over the last 10+ years. When I entered finance (I work for a derivatives trading desk), it was just as Facebook etc were just starting and were becoming the 'cool' places to work. However, nowadays the banking tech sector here in the UK seems to be more mature. Our traders are quite often from a STEM background which gives them an understanding of technology, and they don't adhere to the dicky stereotype you often hear about. But most of all, I've always found my tech colleagues to be extremely smart but also down to earth, pragmatic and meritocratic which is the reason why I've ended up remaining in banking.
BurnGpuBurn 8y ago
> this isn't stealing from the poor. It depends on how you look at things I guess. For instance, when trading in commodities like grain, and deploying a strategy to push the price up over a long time period (whether or not it's a single entity doing so or all traders in unison), people somewhere in the world aren't able to buy that grain and go hungry. Same with all the foodstuffs. But what about other stuff, metals? What happens if you drive those prices up? Well, again, somewhere in the world some poor chap now cannot afford the metal roof sheet that goes on top of his shed, and he'll sleep under the stars. I think most if not all finance trading negatively impacts the people that are too poor to even dream about finance trading. When there's a buck to be made in finance, there's always a sucker paying for it. Somewhere along the line that sucker becomes someone who isn't even in the whole financial trading circus, and he'll in the end foot the bill. It must be this way, because the financial industry itself doesn't produce or increase the value of things, it just manipulates the price tags.
- dm3 8y ago
  The big players used to corner small markets which then led to extreme blowouts. It doesn't happen as much now as there are tighter regulations on max position sizes and the volumes are higher. Significantly influencing the price of a commodity with liquid markets, such as corn or soybeans is pretty much impossible unless you're acting on behalf of a country or are able to control weather. The existence of liquid markets is beneficial for the producers and consumers as the price volatility is reduced and hedging becomes easier. I like to showcase the effect of information on price with the example of fish price in Kerala before and after the introduction of mobile phones to fishermen[1]. The financial world is evolving very quickly with various participants driven by different goals pulling the rug in opposite directions which theoretically should reduce volatility and spreads. However, when people get greedy - and there's a lot of that in finance - bad things happen, e.g. see the natural gas last week[2]. [1]: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Changes-in-fish-price-volatility-with-the-use-of-mobile-phones-in-Kerala_fig4_285771360 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Changes-in-fish-price-vo... [2]: https://www.ft.com/content/b7c525f6-ec44-11e8-89c8-d36339d835c0 https://www.ft.com/content/b7c525f6-ec44-11e8-89c8-d36339d83...
  - 8y ago
mverwijs 8y ago
I worked for the biggest market maker in Europe for three years, from 2008 through to 2011. My experience disagrees with every statement you made, except the job fulfilling part. Making markets does not add any value to anyone other than the marketmakers and the stock exchanges. The only decent thing about those places is that they usually do not beat around the bush. "Does your idea help us be faster? Got proof? Go implement. Money is no objection." Morals did not exist in that world when I was there. What I was doing, was helping the 0.01% consolidate their power and wealth at the cost of all other living beings on this one habitable planet. Then I stopped kidding myself and got out of my golden cage.
- rollulus 8y ago
  Optiver, I presume? I was almost lured into working for them too, being blinded by the high tech playground that it seemed to be. Regarding the adding value, they defend their right to exist as "because of us, instruments are priced properly everywhere and that's good for everyone", isn't it?
  - Applejinx 8y ago
    I'm sure they do, and that's an axiomatic statement that can be horribly, catastrophically wrong but makes them feel better about their lives. Never underestimate the very human emotional motivation of coming up with a pleasing rationalization. Just because someone earnestly says 'we are helping, so much!' doesn't mean they're correct.
    - mverwijs 8y ago
      I experienced it exactly as you describe. To me this argument always came across as fabricated and empty. I have seen too many examples internally at that place, where the (to me) obvious moral choice was neglected or even laughed at. The "because of us, instruments are priced properly everywhere and that's good for everyone" is interesting. Does that result solely exist because of us making a market? What is 'properly priced' exactly and why would it be a Bad Thing if it were less 'properly priced'? And why is this even a goal that should be pursued? And should that goal be pursued at all (and I do mean ALL) cost? Those questions were never answered to my satisfaction.
amelius 8y ago
> Is the job fulfilling? ... > Is the job moral? ... But in what way do you consider your job meaningful?
dkersten 8y ago
> this isn't stealing from the poor Except when the finance industry creates (directly or indirectly) a financial crisis like in 2008. Its the poor, that never stood to gain from the financial system in the first place, that end up hit the worst.
- newguynewguy 8y ago
  Many of them got to live in really big mcmansions they should not have been allowed to 'afford' for about 10 years. The labor spent building those houses could have been spent building twice as many small houses.
  - dasil003 8y ago
    Those people got foreclosed. The banks got bailed out, took property off the market, and prevented the market to properly settle. Tons of people are still locked out of the market in order to protect everyone else’s “investment” by artificially propping up the value.
  - fifnir 8y ago
    Wasn't the risk shared between those who got to live in mcmansions and those who gave them the money for that? Why does one party get to reap all the benefits but pay none of the consequences?
  - kaitai 8y ago
    It's not the poor who got the mcmansions.... it's the not-rich. Big difference.
  - dkersten 8y ago
    Many people didn’t have this at all and we’re still very negatively impacted by the recession due to loss of employment or raised taxes (eg I personally did not benefit from the pre-recession as I was too young and my family wasn’t particularly well off nor had a mortgage and I entered the job market right in the midst of the recession and I was hit with an income levy introduced to bail the banks out — I was personally lucky as tech wasn’t particularly heavily affected but many people were not so lucky).
pc86 8y ago
Do you have any suggestions for someone who wants to get into the fintech space with no financial experience but 10-12 years of Enterprise software development/architecture and some management?
wpietri 8y ago
> We also try to turn money into more money, it's pretty much the game of life whether you play it or not. That is definitely not the "game of life". Most business works by creating value for others. It's generally positive sum. Indeed, the only way people in zero-sum industries (e.g., betting, a lot of advertising, many kinds of finance) or negative-sum ones (e.g., scams) have anything to siphon off is because of people doing productive work. One of reasons I'm most glad to get out of finance is that I could stop trying to justify it to myself. As Upton Sinclair wrote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

sigi45 8y ago

Win against whom? People with less knowledge. Less technology. There should not be an additional layer of risk involved only because people bet on other people. If I buy a share from company x, the success of that company should represent the share price. But that is partially true. And NO enough people have no idea what they are doing. In Germany we increased the requirements for trading. You have to read stuff and sign off otherwise the bank will not allow you to buy certain products. Is the job moral? No.

quanticle 8y ago
In Germany we increased the requirements for trading. You have to read stuff and sign off otherwise the bank will not allow you to buy certain products. We have that in the US too. While ordinary "retail" investors can buy stocks and bonds (which they can do in Germany too, I presume), most of the "exotic" products that people complain about are restricted to "accredited" investors. In order to be an accredited investor in the US, you have to be one of the following: - a bank, insurance company, registered investment company, business development company, or small business investment company - an employee benefit plan, within the meaning of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, if a bank, insurance company or registered investment adviser makes the investment decisions, or if the plan has total assets in excess of 5,000,000 dollars - a charitable organization, corporation, or partnership with assets exceeding 5,000,000 dollars - a director, general officer, or partner of the company selling the securities - a business in which all the equity owners are accredited investors - a natural person who has individual net worth or joint net worth with the person's spouse that exceeds 1,000,000 dollars at the time of purchase or has assets under management of 1,000,000 dollars or above, excluding the value of the individual's primary residence - a natural person with income exceeding 200,000 dollars per year in each of the two most recent years or joint income with a spouse exceeding 300,000 dollars per year in those years and a reasonable expectation of the same income level for the current year - a trust with assets in excess of 5,000,000 dollars not formed to acquire the securities offered whose purchases a sophisticated person makes So as you can see, there are already quite stringent requirements for trading most "exotic" derivatives in the US. You either have to be a millionaire, have the backing of an institution, have government certification or all of the above in order to trade things like mortgage-backed securities and government bonds. I have zero ethical qualms about winning when I know that the other people I'm competing against are millionaires, have institutional backing, have government approval or all of the above.
- olau 8y ago
  I think the point was that having smart people participate is wasting their time when they could be doing something more productive, not who is losing. Like for instance work on robotic arms so we can all have a household robot to do the house chores.
  - lallysingh 8y ago
    I could argue the same about physicists not working on FTL. Or medical research on non-life threatening diseases. It's a bit unfair.
    - wpietri 8y ago
      Medical research on non-life-threatening things is still creating value for people with less-than-fatal problems. Physicists working on physics research might be a problem if those physicists could just divert money elsewhere in the economy into their own research programs. As it is, there's a complex system of controls so that public research money is generally used for some reasonably good purpose.
- lewilewilewi 8y ago
  Cool, so my measly pension is invested in a pension fund (as it has to be, legally). The pension fund managers then buy some exotics, which gives me exposure to the same exotics. then something bad happens, such as 2008, and I lose my future. Thanks guys, the stringent requirements really worked in my favour there!
Gibbon1 8y ago
> People with less knowledge. Less technology. One of my observations, to make a living you need an angle. This isn't necessarily 'bad'. A mechanic has years of experience and tools, and a lift. In return for parting with cash he'll do something for you (hopefully). Trading houses use their angle to do something to you, namely siphon off some of your money without providing you anything.

4ff6f7fd26e 8y ago

> Anyone who puts their money on the line knows the risks, this isn't stealing from the poor. The problem here is that, for example, at least in the US, not everyone with a pension or who "contibutes" to a retirement plan is comfortable or even aware of the risks. That ignorance is not a defense, per-se, but if you've got blinders on that you're fleecing pennies off the already rich you are sorely mistaken. I'd go so far as to argue that turning money into more money without providing a good or service in exchange is squarely immoral.

Novashi 8y ago
The service in this case is facilitating a trade. Liquidity is important, but I think it was oversold to pull some of the PR heat off of HFT. Especially since a lot of retail investing advice has turned to index funds, liquidity for individual stocks matters less for them -- it also means they don't have to understand as much financial info before investing (just read the index's prospectus every year vs. reading a whole bunch of company financial filings every quarter).
attende_domine 8y ago
C. S. Lewis on interest (from Mere Christianity): >There is one bit of advice given to us by the ancient heathen Greeks, and by the Jews in the Old Testament, and by the great Christian teachers of the Middle Ages, which the modern economic system has completely disobeyed. All these people told us not to lend money at interest: and lending money at interest — what we call investment — is the basis of our whole system. Now it may not absolutely follow that we are wrong. Some people say that when Moses and Aristotle and the Christians agreed in forbidding interest (or “usury” as they called it), they could not foresee the joint stock company, and were only dunking of the private moneylender, and that, therefore, we need not bother about what they said. >That is a question I cannot decide on. I am not an economist and I simply do not know whether the investment system is responsible for the state we are in or not. This is where we want the Christian economist. But I should not have been honest if I had not told you that three great civilizations had agreed (or so it seems at first sight) in condemning the very thing on which we have based our whole life.
- 8y ago

exikyut 8y ago

> I've gained a huge knowledge of low level programming This is really interesting. I'm at least passingly aware about high speed/frequency trading, but don't know much about the topic in depth. How low is low in this field? I'm picturing RTOSes running AVX512-heavy hand-optimized code, FPGA farms, custom network ASICs... how overly optimistic am I being here? Heh Of course, such a vision is very lop-sided, since HFT depends heavily on high-level intelligence. So perhaps it's realtime(ish) Linux and lots of GPUs.

mverwijs 8y ago
Not realtime, because that only enforces 'precision', not low latency per se. When I was working in this field, 2008-2011, there were guys doing fpgas, custom tcp/ip stacks, custom network drivers, dedicated networks and network cards for exchange data coming in and for going out. Mostly linux. Hardware and lowlevel fun. Allthough the fastest trades were always done by this one catalonian guy using Windows and .NET. I kid you not. Good times. Soulless. But good.
- exikyut 8y ago
  How does realtime enforce precision and not latency? I was referring to hard realtime. And wow, so I wasn't too far off the mark. FPGAs and exotic networking. Huh. I remember reading a story about a trading floor running on SQL Server, which was doing continuous throughput of 6000 queries/second. I didn't know enough at the time to discern what percentage of that was writes, but I think the point may have been that it was all of it. This was quite a few years ago. So perhaps Windows isn't actually the slowe{st,r} system out there for certain tasks.
  - mverwijs 8y ago
    As I've always understood (but I'm no RTOS expert) is that RTOS does not guarantee LOWER latency. It guarantees A latency. But again: not an RTOS expert. We had a lab that would constantly test configurations of hardware and software. And I remember them finding RTOS not being helpful.

ahallan 8y ago

I've tried to grapple with this notion over the last 10+ years. When I entered finance (I work for a derivatives trading desk), it was just as Facebook etc were just starting and were becoming the 'cool' places to work. However, nowadays the banking tech sector here in the UK seems to be more mature. Our traders are quite often from a STEM background which gives them an understanding of technology, and they don't adhere to the dicky stereotype you often hear about. But most of all, I've always found my tech colleagues to be extremely smart but also down to earth, pragmatic and meritocratic which is the reason why I've ended up remaining in banking.

BurnGpuBurn 8y ago

> this isn't stealing from the poor. It depends on how you look at things I guess. For instance, when trading in commodities like grain, and deploying a strategy to push the price up over a long time period (whether or not it's a single entity doing so or all traders in unison), people somewhere in the world aren't able to buy that grain and go hungry. Same with all the foodstuffs. But what about other stuff, metals? What happens if you drive those prices up? Well, again, somewhere in the world some poor chap now cannot afford the metal roof sheet that goes on top of his shed, and he'll sleep under the stars. I think most if not all finance trading negatively impacts the people that are too poor to even dream about finance trading. When there's a buck to be made in finance, there's always a sucker paying for it. Somewhere along the line that sucker becomes someone who isn't even in the whole financial trading circus, and he'll in the end foot the bill. It must be this way, because the financial industry itself doesn't produce or increase the value of things, it just manipulates the price tags.

dm3 8y ago
The big players used to corner small markets which then led to extreme blowouts. It doesn't happen as much now as there are tighter regulations on max position sizes and the volumes are higher. Significantly influencing the price of a commodity with liquid markets, such as corn or soybeans is pretty much impossible unless you're acting on behalf of a country or are able to control weather. The existence of liquid markets is beneficial for the producers and consumers as the price volatility is reduced and hedging becomes easier. I like to showcase the effect of information on price with the example of fish price in Kerala before and after the introduction of mobile phones to fishermen[1]. The financial world is evolving very quickly with various participants driven by different goals pulling the rug in opposite directions which theoretically should reduce volatility and spreads. However, when people get greedy - and there's a lot of that in finance - bad things happen, e.g. see the natural gas last week[2]. [1]: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Changes-in-fish-price-volatility-with-the-use-of-mobile-phones-in-Kerala_fig4_285771360 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Changes-in-fish-price-vo... [2]: https://www.ft.com/content/b7c525f6-ec44-11e8-89c8-d36339d835c0 https://www.ft.com/content/b7c525f6-ec44-11e8-89c8-d36339d83...
- 8y ago

mverwijs 8y ago

I worked for the biggest market maker in Europe for three years, from 2008 through to 2011. My experience disagrees with every statement you made, except the job fulfilling part. Making markets does not add any value to anyone other than the marketmakers and the stock exchanges. The only decent thing about those places is that they usually do not beat around the bush. "Does your idea help us be faster? Got proof? Go implement. Money is no objection." Morals did not exist in that world when I was there. What I was doing, was helping the 0.01% consolidate their power and wealth at the cost of all other living beings on this one habitable planet. Then I stopped kidding myself and got out of my golden cage.

rollulus 8y ago
Optiver, I presume? I was almost lured into working for them too, being blinded by the high tech playground that it seemed to be. Regarding the adding value, they defend their right to exist as "because of us, instruments are priced properly everywhere and that's good for everyone", isn't it?
- Applejinx 8y ago
  I'm sure they do, and that's an axiomatic statement that can be horribly, catastrophically wrong but makes them feel better about their lives. Never underestimate the very human emotional motivation of coming up with a pleasing rationalization. Just because someone earnestly says 'we are helping, so much!' doesn't mean they're correct.
  - mverwijs 8y ago
    I experienced it exactly as you describe. To me this argument always came across as fabricated and empty. I have seen too many examples internally at that place, where the (to me) obvious moral choice was neglected or even laughed at. The "because of us, instruments are priced properly everywhere and that's good for everyone" is interesting. Does that result solely exist because of us making a market? What is 'properly priced' exactly and why would it be a Bad Thing if it were less 'properly priced'? And why is this even a goal that should be pursued? And should that goal be pursued at all (and I do mean ALL) cost? Those questions were never answered to my satisfaction.

amelius 8y ago

> Is the job fulfilling? ... > Is the job moral? ... But in what way do you consider your job meaningful?

dkersten 8y ago

> this isn't stealing from the poor Except when the finance industry creates (directly or indirectly) a financial crisis like in 2008. Its the poor, that never stood to gain from the financial system in the first place, that end up hit the worst.

newguynewguy 8y ago
Many of them got to live in really big mcmansions they should not have been allowed to 'afford' for about 10 years. The labor spent building those houses could have been spent building twice as many small houses.
- dasil003 8y ago
  Those people got foreclosed. The banks got bailed out, took property off the market, and prevented the market to properly settle. Tons of people are still locked out of the market in order to protect everyone else’s “investment” by artificially propping up the value.
- fifnir 8y ago
  Wasn't the risk shared between those who got to live in mcmansions and those who gave them the money for that? Why does one party get to reap all the benefits but pay none of the consequences?
- kaitai 8y ago
  It's not the poor who got the mcmansions.... it's the not-rich. Big difference.
- dkersten 8y ago
  Many people didn’t have this at all and we’re still very negatively impacted by the recession due to loss of employment or raised taxes (eg I personally did not benefit from the pre-recession as I was too young and my family wasn’t particularly well off nor had a mortgage and I entered the job market right in the midst of the recession and I was hit with an income levy introduced to bail the banks out — I was personally lucky as tech wasn’t particularly heavily affected but many people were not so lucky).

pc86 8y ago

Do you have any suggestions for someone who wants to get into the fintech space with no financial experience but 10-12 years of Enterprise software development/architecture and some management?

wpietri 8y ago

> We also try to turn money into more money, it's pretty much the game of life whether you play it or not. That is definitely not the "game of life". Most business works by creating value for others. It's generally positive sum. Indeed, the only way people in zero-sum industries (e.g., betting, a lot of advertising, many kinds of finance) or negative-sum ones (e.g., scams) have anything to siphon off is because of people doing productive work. One of reasons I'm most glad to get out of finance is that I could stop trying to justify it to myself. As Upton Sinclair wrote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"