[rwallace]

> Might be better to make some good money, and then retire kind of young and focus on whatever else you really want to do with complete financial freedom.

That's an attractive idea in theory, but it almost never works out that way in practice. Your brain rewires itself over the years to match what you're doing. Unless you are very unusual, your expenses will drift up to match your income. You are almost certainly much better off to make your plans as though today was the first day of the rest of your life.

> I suspect that traders actually do contribute though, just like every single other sector of the economy.

Absolutely, they do. But it has to be past the point of diminishing returns by now. Cutting the time to move capital from a week to a day was surely a contribution to the economy. Cutting it from a hundred milliseconds to fifty milliseconds? I have a hard time believing that does more for the economy than writing a better poker bot.

> If you really want to understand the cutting edge and see new opportunities, you have to be carefully reading the research papers that are being published

Business opportunities usually arise some way behind the cutting edge. You are right of course that you don't want to fall into writing yet another cat photograph website because you don't know how to do anything else. But neither do you want to waste the best years of your life obsessing about the mathematical properties of some esoteric algorithm that ends up being no better than off-the-shelf algorithms on practical workloads. The sweet spot tends to be somewhere in the middle.