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A comment on What's the Least Impactful Way to Spend $300,000,000?. Parent comment

Re:What's the Least Impactful Way to Spend $300,000,000? by jwestbury on Friday April 14, 2023 @04:47AM (#35567083)
How about an even better -- and more salient -- example? Quant trading firms are gobbling up promising researchers in fields like physics and mathematics. These are people getting funded Ph.Ds at top universities (Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, etc.), and they end up just going to companies which exist solely for the purpose of making rich people richer.
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Re:What's the Least Impactful Way to Spend $300,000,000? by pembrook on Friday April 14, 2023 @05:05AM (#35567191)
Quant firms provide value to society, hence why they are compensated for it.

Liquidity and price discovery are useful things. Nobody would pay them otherwise.

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Re:What's the Least Impactful Way to Spend $300,000,000? by jabradoodle on Friday April 14, 2023 @05:28AM (#35567302)
If the definition of providing value to society = making a profit, then is selling heroin providing value to society?
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Re:What's the Least Impactful Way to Spend $300,000,000? by bheadmaster on Friday April 14, 2023 @06:50AM (#35567928)
> Liquidity and price discovery are useful things. Nobody would pay them otherwise.

Is there any other evidence of their usefulness beyond "people pay for it"?

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Re:What's the Least Impactful Way to Spend $300,000,000? by sokoloff on Friday April 14, 2023 @09:01AM (#35569105)
On the liquidity side, would you pay more for a security that you could easily and quickly sell with small slippage than you would for a security that could not be easily sold or only sold with a large slippage?

"People pay for [that]" because it's a genuinely useful property of an investment vehicle.

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