[Jorge1o1]

You hit on so many great points in this post. Another important function trading firms (especially market makers like Jane Street) is to serve as ready-and-willing counterparties for the pension funds, endowments, and retirement funds of the world.

All of those firefighters, police officers, and teachers can't get their monthly check unless the pension funds converts part of their investment into cash, and the amount traded gets so large you need well-funded financial participants who will pay the pension fund a large lump of cash and assume the risk of unwinding the position.

The same thing goes for portfolio rebalances. Some smart and prudent retirement fund has run their risk model and decided that their sector exposures are off by like a few percent. They've got 2% too much financials, 2% too little tech, they want to move 1% from consumer staples to consumer discretionary, etc. We're talking about billions of dollars being moved right here! They want to use the money from the assets they sold to purchase the assets they bought, but they want the transaction to happen all at once... not in two parts. Again, this is where the quant funds and market makers of the world come in.

It's easy to think that finance is all fat cats, hedge funds and multibillionaires, but anybody with a retirement plan, a pension, ETF holdings, or mutual fund holdings, benefits from the work these quant funds do.

[jollybean]

Just because financial firms provide legitimately important services, doesn't mean the value they capture is commensurate with that value creation.

So yes, it's a leap of abstraction for most people to grasp that 'market making' etc. is an important function, and that there's legit value created.

... but the amount of surplus capture is gigantic and that's the problem.

Fouquet became Louis IX 'CFO' and somehow at the same time amassed massive wealth possibly illegitimately and so he lost his head very quickly.

It's always the people closest to the piles of Gold that end up with all of the Gold. There are a million ways they justify it, and in free markets where information and relations are 'the power', well, they have it all.

Usually it's 'generally very talented' people involved, of that I have no doubt, but that again doesn't justify necessarily the surplus capture.

[Nursie]

> It's always the people closest to the piles of Gold that end up with all of the Gold.

Honestly it's a lesson I've taken in my career so far - those who are closest to the money flows get to siphon off the most for themselves. I'm by no means that close, but it certainly informs what I put myself forward for.

Does the difference in skill, effort and output justify it? No, and many of the people working close to the money are no better (or are often far worse) than people further away, being paid less. But people are willing to pay them more, because they are also close to the larger flows of money.

[whatshisface]

If you count the trading firms that don't do so well, are the people in finance really making off with all that much money, or is it the best firms taking all the sunlight from the middle and worst firms?

[jollybean]

Sure, but then you'd have to count the regular businesses that don't post heavy profits of which there are many.

Also either it's 'market making' or 'trading' I think it should never be the same thing under one roof and that market making should have a fair bit of regulation and transparency.

[filoleg]

Are you aware of market making actually means?

Because your statement about "either it's 'market making' or 'trading' I think it should never be the same thing under one roof" is like saying "it either gotta be 'playing soccer' or 'kicking the ball', they should not be the same".

Sure, "kicking the ball" is done by many different sports and in many different ways, but it is literally an integral part of playing soccer, so you cannot say "either or" here. The same.

The whole point of market making is trading securities at both ask prices and sell prices, thus providing liquidity to the markets. So they essentially are making profit off bid-ask spread, but doing so reduces bid-ask spread and decreases market inefficiency (thus converging on a more accurate value of the security in question).

And to your point about regulation of market makers, they already have more than just a "fair bit of regulation and transparency".

[jollybean]

Yes, of course, it was a poor choice of words on my part, of course market making implies 'trading', I meant to imply advising parties on both sides of a trade, or other forms of conflict of interest.