Hedge fund guy here. Every desk I ever sat on talked about macro, but none of them ever made any money from it. Equity options, fixed income (the home of macro

Hedge fund guy here. Every desk I ever sat on talked about macro, but none of them ever made any money from it. Equity options, fixed income (the home of macro traders), trend following, HFT, and so on. Everybody throws around macro vocab, nobody has anything resembling an idea of how it affects markets. Or rather, nobody has a convincing framework for how things connect. Bonds, STIRs, Fed Funds rates, inflation, growth, unemployment, all that, all you ever seem to get is individual stories that sound good but that don't fit into any kind of explanation of how the economy works. I did a degree in economics too, and unsurprisingly that also did not bring everything together. Contrast that with eg thermodynamics where over time all the stuff makes sense, and it even connects with information theory. Even if you did have a coherent macro story, you would struggle to answer the most important question: What is priced in? This is mostly a question about local dynamics rather than macro. Why are used cars expensive? What about chips? What about bonds and currencies and so on? All things that you can learn about, just not in a macro book.