I think you’re totally right that to the extent that the stock market is a zero-sum game retail traders will lose almost every time, since the big players on the other end will always have more information and power to leverage that information than retail.
I think a lot of the relevance of this comment depends on your view of stock-market-as-casino vs stock-market-as-generator-of-wealth-at-several-steps-removed. I take the view that it’s mostly the latter; widget maker IPOs, accepts money from big institutional IPO investor and buys capital with it in exchange for proceeds, IPO investor (effectively after several intermediate trades) sells that share of proceeds-generated-from-capital to retail trader. The capital is still doing stuff for people! It’s just exactly what it’s doing is totally opaque to almost everyone.
I think you’re totally right that to the extent that the stock market is a zero-sum game retail traders will lose almost every time, since the big players on the other end will always have more information and power to leverage that information than retail.
I think a lot of the relevance of this comment depends on your view of stock-market-as-casino vs stock-market-as-generator-of-wealth-at-several-steps-removed. I take the view that it’s mostly the latter; widget maker IPOs, accepts money from big institutional IPO investor and buys capital with it in exchange for proceeds, IPO investor (effectively after several intermediate trades) sells that share of proceeds-generated-from-capital to retail trader. The capital is still doing stuff for people! It’s just exactly what it’s doing is totally opaque to almost everyone.
agreed agreed agreed
but hey guess what the market rebounded today so yay for that?