What is the role of people like day traders, futures brokers, and such to society? Do they serve a useful purpose, or are they just parasites?
Somehow this sounds more /politics/ than /science/.
Nah, I wanted to look at it from a macroeconomic point of view.
Let's send them all off on a spaceship, shall we?
>Let's send them all off on a spaceship, shall we?
Absolutely not! If we miss, we blow our only chance. We must use a nuke instead.
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>>1 on a macroeconomic scale, they ensure that exchange rates are at market values. Also, more importantly, it is them that ensure foreign trade as they are the intermediaries between demand and supply in different countries, providing the required currencies.
>>1
Demand and supply makes shure that the best product is the one that wins , without it we get only crap.
Thus traders and such is needed.
> Demand and supply makes shure that the best product is the one that wins
For very broad definitions of "best"...
I don't think >>8 even knows what a "day trader" is.
I don't like elitist business types, but I recognize that they're doing shit that I'm not even remotely interested in and could probably never do. I took an intro microecon course, hated every day of it, and ended up with a B. I know what day trading is, but I'm an economics moron so I have no idea how or if day trading is detrimental to corporations...anyone fill me in?
I'm an Econ PhD student and I still don't really understand trading of assets outside of a theoretical level. Some of the models and papers on trading are very interesting. I suggest Grossman Stiglitz 1985 - a classic information economics paper.
>Do they serve a useful purpose, or are they just parasites?
Parasites have uses too
Good humans live to serve themselves, not sacrifice themselves to society.
You're welcome to fuck right off out of society. Just don't expect to use our roads, cities or utilities.
You pay by serving society.
>>1 they spread risk, basically. Expectations of price and quantity of goods are usually not the same as how they turn out to be in reality. If you hold some bonds and you believe that its value will be reduced later (perhaps you heard something that alarmed you about the prospects of your investment) then you might like to step out of this investment with the smallest loss possible. Maybe you find a person who is not that afraid about the prospects for the same bond. In that case, you can sell that bond to him. The future will show whether you should've held on to that bond, or whether you were damn right to get rid of it, but at least you don't have to worry about it anymore right now.
This transaction is solely about risk (the difference between expectations of two agents). Obviously the people who want to be in this trading profession can't afford to make too many mistakes, or they'll be bankrupt very soon. They take great care to assemble all possible information available about the prospects of just about anything that can be traded.
The fact that these traders are around makes it much more cheaper to trade, because they are all competing against each other, so that you actually get a 'fair' price when buying or selling, instead of facing outrageous prices which you would get without them.