[chadash]

I believe that this is quite untrue. Finance is full of clever innovations that are mostly meant to make money for their creators. Because the monetary rewards are so high, it attracts some very talented people.

As just one example, you can securitize the revenues from golf courses. You can say, hey, i own six courses bringing in an average of $100m a year. I'm gonna take that $600m cash flow and sell it in an asset-backed security in order to raise money to finance the acquisition of more golf courses. Then I'm gonna tranche up those securities, because I found that I'll make more money selling 50% super safe and 50% risky than selling it as 100% middle-of-the-road risky. This example isn't really a hack anymore... it's almost the norm. But someone had to have the initial insight and then figure out if this was legal.

[college_physics]

Securitization is a good example of a finance hack but I have to mention that it is half a century old innovation. Ofcourse, C/C++ is also about that age and people still talk about it on HN (mostly to proclaim its dead, but very frequently about some amazing and impactful projects based on it that still go strong)

But this brings to a second peculiarity of the financial world of today that makes it less fitting for an open discussion forum of (aspiring) fin-techies like HN. Its very proprietary, secretive and dominated by a few megaplayers (pick any subdomain: banking, asset management, trading platforms, credit ratings, credit scoring etc. there is some oligopoly milking it and they are not about to open it up to random DIY hackers)

One area that was quite intriguing for a while and maybe conducive to a more decentralized discourse (but predictably hasn't gone anywhere) is peer-to-peer lending.

p.s. my parent comment is downvoted even if it is about the only one in this thread that doesn't pitch some stonks forum or another. Alas, the milking machine is well oiled...