There seems to be a fundamental lack of understanding of finance in this thread, even from those that have worked in financial companies. "First, Finance" is a

There seems to be a fundamental lack of understanding of finance in this thread, even from those that have worked in financial companies. "First, Finance" is an extremely nebulous term, encompassing many subfields. At its core, a financial firm like a proprietary trading company that invests money creates value by attempting to optimize the allocation of capital. Do we give money to Google and trust that they will turn it into something more or do we give it to Elon Musk? It turns out that this is really hard to do. If this were easy, pro sports players wouldn't go broke funding terrible projects. While they don't have a direct hand in product design, creation, or sales, they have an indirect one. Of course, there are firms that really abstract themselves from this process and basically just play the market as a game, with 100% technical analysis and short term positions and no fundamental analysis.