Investing is entertainment, traders are celebrities, BREAKING news has live odds, everyone has inside information, the American dream is to get rich quick.
Solid framing of the structural shift from "buy and hold" to pure velocity trading. The smartphone-as-casino analogy is apt, but what really caught my eye was the insider trading democratization angle. If every market participant potentially has edge on some domain specific event, we're not just compressing timelines, we're fundamentaly restructuring information assymetry at scale.
There’s a case that insiders improve market pricing (they do), but they also change norms about how people with privileged information should behave. Should athletes bet on their own games? They shouldn’t because there are explicit league rules against this, but should their friends or acquaintances? Should a waiter at a restaurant who overheard the athlete say something about the starting lineup? Should someone who went to the same gym as the athlete who can see that they look injured before a game? These things used to be gossip before, but now there are explicit markets to profit from them. The positive externality is that news comes with live odds, which is arguably more accurate than gossip.
Please edit your Equities graph, footnote #3: Fidelity and Schwab numbers should be $X Trillion, not Billion, thanks.
Fixed, thank you for noticing.
Solid framing of the structural shift from "buy and hold" to pure velocity trading. The smartphone-as-casino analogy is apt, but what really caught my eye was the insider trading democratization angle. If every market participant potentially has edge on some domain specific event, we're not just compressing timelines, we're fundamentaly restructuring information assymetry at scale.
There’s a case that insiders improve market pricing (they do), but they also change norms about how people with privileged information should behave. Should athletes bet on their own games? They shouldn’t because there are explicit league rules against this, but should their friends or acquaintances? Should a waiter at a restaurant who overheard the athlete say something about the starting lineup? Should someone who went to the same gym as the athlete who can see that they look injured before a game? These things used to be gossip before, but now there are explicit markets to profit from them. The positive externality is that news comes with live odds, which is arguably more accurate than gossip.