> Time value of money, optionality, non-arbitrage. Another big one is "opacity". A financial product that is convoluted and needlessly complicated allows the m

> Time value of money, optionality, non-arbitrage. Another big one is "opacity". A financial product that is convoluted and needlessly complicated allows the most sophisticated financial players to consistently take advantage of the rest. Much in finance is zero sum. Your outperformance is somebody else's underperformance. Financial products that are understood by everybody will not make you a lot of money, because they will trade approximately at their fair value. This is why so much in finance is complex instead of simple. By analogy: PDF is terribly complicated because Adobe didn't want their PDF software to become commoditized. A bad and illogical file spec benefits Adobe at the expense of everybody else.