Comment by pizzalife
4 hours ago
It's funny to think some of the world's largest trades are being done in something that resembles a game's tradechat. (WTS bonds)
4 hours ago
It's funny to think some of the world's largest trades are being done in something that resembles a game's tradechat. (WTS bonds)
Unlocked a core memory for me!
Anyone else old enough to remember scripting a tradebot in Asheron's Call?
For a long time fixed income trading took place over AOL Instant Messenger and later Yahoo chat rooms.
I am not making this up.
There were custom frontends that would enrich things like cusips.
I find it a bit less funny. There is this perception that what finance people do is super important and grown up but following a brief stint in the industry I realised it literally is just a game. We used to trade bits of stationery and trading cards for fun at school. They never stopped. The only difference is people who never consented to any of this are paying for it all, especially when it all goes wrong.
That should have been obvious from the mere fact that the bottom rungs are almost completely populated by silver-spooned nepo-babies.
> the bottom rungs are almost completely populated by silver-spooned nepo-babies
You’re thinking of investment banking, corporate finance. Trading has always been the place folks from less privileged backgrounds got into finance. In the old days, Jews. (Like, into the 50s.) In the 80s, poor schmucks.
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Why would a trader need your consent to make a trade with somebody else?
I assumed they were referring to market crashes caused by irresponsible levels of risks and deceptive practices like we saw in 2008, and/or government-funded bailouts
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why should we have financial regulation at all, is that what you're getting at?
"Capitalism bad" is generally their point
often they're trading things with externalities
It’s pretty bad except that any other way is even worse.