When I was a kid I joined a crackers' group. With them I learned very strong programming.
I decided it would be a good idea using the computer as a tool to understand financial markets so I started creating programs to play with outcomes and probabilities ... something like generic programming we will call today in order to augment your human perception using lots of data.
It started as a game but soon I made over 400% benefit in the stock market that year(with very little money). It seemed at the time few people were doing that. That made me regretting it because from my point of view you can expect a 10% increase reasonable from real creation of value. Values much bigger than this means you have just taken money from those that do not have the tooling(the normal people who "invest" in the stock market, and lose). The big guys, called the "sharks", never loose.
That made me feel very bad inside, while I was making money in the outside.
On the other hand, it drove me absolutely crazy. Emotionally this tool magnified any bump in the stock market making myself constantly alert, even having problems sleeping as the thing will work even by night doing things like analyzing the Asian or US markets while in Europe they were closed.
Imagine something alerts you in the night with an alarm, so you can study it for the next day,it can be any day, at any hour... when you are young you do very stupid things. That kind of thing was a torture of totalitarian regimes and I had chosen to do it to myself voluntarily.
One day I decided to sell anything and to extract the hard drive and break it with a hammer so I could not recover the program if I changed my opinion later.
I don't understand why this is not believable. If someone has a conscious and believes in fairness, why shouldn't they feel bad about exploiting a market to profit without creating value? That's being a bit of a leech, which some people are fine with, and others are not.
The OP said he would have felt fine had his returns been limited to 10%. I hope you realize your characterization of returns ("profit without creating value") can be applied whether his program yielded 10% returns or 400%. The moral dilemma for someone who has a conscious that you describe would be choosing to invest in the first place (is investing on the stock market creating value?) or choosing an investment strategy (is this certain strategy creating value?).
I decided it would be a good idea using the computer as a tool to understand financial markets so I started creating programs to play with outcomes and probabilities ... something like generic programming we will call today in order to augment your human perception using lots of data.
It started as a game but soon I made over 400% benefit in the stock market that year(with very little money). It seemed at the time few people were doing that. That made me regretting it because from my point of view you can expect a 10% increase reasonable from real creation of value. Values much bigger than this means you have just taken money from those that do not have the tooling(the normal people who "invest" in the stock market, and lose). The big guys, called the "sharks", never loose.
That made me feel very bad inside, while I was making money in the outside.
On the other hand, it drove me absolutely crazy. Emotionally this tool magnified any bump in the stock market making myself constantly alert, even having problems sleeping as the thing will work even by night doing things like analyzing the Asian or US markets while in Europe they were closed.
Imagine something alerts you in the night with an alarm, so you can study it for the next day,it can be any day, at any hour... when you are young you do very stupid things. That kind of thing was a torture of totalitarian regimes and I had chosen to do it to myself voluntarily.
One day I decided to sell anything and to extract the hard drive and break it with a hammer so I could not recover the program if I changed my opinion later.
It was a great idea. It gave me peace of mind.