> People with less knowledge. Less technology.

One of my observations, to make a living you need an angle. This isn't necessarily 'bad'. A mechanic has years of experience and tools, and a lift. In return for parting with cash he'll do something for you (hopefully). Trading houses use their angle to do something to you, namely siphon off some of your money without providing you anything.

    In Germany we increased the requirements for trading. You have to read stuff
    and sign off otherwise the bank will not allow you to buy certain products.

We have that in the US too. While ordinary "retail" investors can buy stocks and bonds (which they can do in Germany too, I presume), most of the "exotic" products that people complain about are restricted to "accredited" investors. In order to be an accredited investor in the US, you have to be one of the following:

    - a bank, insurance company, registered investment company, business
      development company, or small business investment company
    
    - an employee benefit plan, within the meaning of the Employee Retirement
      Income Security Act, if a bank, insurance company or registered investment
      adviser makes the investment decisions, or if the plan has total assets in
      excess of 5,000,000 dollars

    - a charitable organization, corporation, or partnership with assets
      exceeding 5,000,000 dollars

    - a director, general officer, or partner of the company selling the
      securities

    - a business in which all the equity owners are accredited investors

    - a natural person who has individual net worth or joint net worth with the
      person's spouse that exceeds 1,000,000 dollars at the time of purchase or
      has assets under management of 1,000,000 dollars or above, excluding the
      value of the individual's primary residence

    - a natural person with income exceeding 200,000 dollars per year in each of
      the two most recent years or joint income with a spouse exceeding 300,000
      dollars per year in those years and a reasonable expectation of the same
      income level for the current year

    - a trust with assets in excess of 5,000,000 dollars not formed to acquire
      the securities offered whose purchases a sophisticated person makes

So as you can see, there are already quite stringent requirements for trading most "exotic" derivatives in the US. You either have to be a millionaire, have the backing of an institution, have government certification or all of the above in order to trade things like mortgage-backed securities and government bonds.

I have zero ethical qualms about winning when I know that the other people I'm competing against are millionaires, have institutional backing, have government approval or all of the above.

Cool, so my measly pension is invested in a pension fund (as it has to be, legally). The pension fund managers then buy some exotics, which gives me exposure to the same exotics. then something bad happens, such as 2008, and I lose my future. Thanks guys, the stringent requirements really worked in my favour there!

I think the point was that having smart people participate is wasting their time when they could be doing something more productive, not who is losing. Like for instance work on robotic arms so we can all have a household robot to do the house chores.

I could argue the same about physicists not working on FTL. Or medical research on non-life threatening diseases. It's a bit unfair.

Medical research on non-life-threatening things is still creating value for people with less-than-fatal problems.

Physicists working on physics research might be a problem if those physicists could just divert money elsewhere in the economy into their own research programs. As it is, there's a complex system of controls so that public research money is generally used for some reasonably good purpose.