I find it a bit less funny. There is this perception that what finance people do is super important and grown up but following a brief stint in the industry I realised it literally is just a game. We used to trade bits of stationery and trading cards for fun at school. They never stopped. The only difference is people who never consented to any of this are paying for it all, especially when it all goes wrong.
I assumed they were referring to market crashes caused by irresponsible levels of risks and deceptive practices like we saw in 2008, and/or government-funded bailouts
> the bottom rungs are almost completely populated by silver-spooned nepo-babies
You’re thinking of investment banking, corporate finance. Trading has always been the place folks from less privileged backgrounds got into finance. In the old days, Jews. (Like, into the 50s.) In the 80s, poor schmucks.
I know a lot of traders from both university and growing up around rich kids. Their parents are invariably very wealthy. They were the ones who had the time and safety net to sit around on computers all the time (like me becoming a programmer)
I’m not in the trading world though so I haven’t met the ones that don’t fit this description.
But exactly zero of the people I know who were raised in either poverty or mediocrity are traders or involved in finance, aside from maybe accounting.
Of course, this is all anecdotal - but I’ve only ever seen Bloomberg terminals outside of office settings in the apartments of wealthy children.
Perhaps things were a bit different decades ago, in the scrappy past, but it feels like most higher earning spheres are closing in around pre-existing wealth.
I was. Algorithmic derivatives. The rich kids went into banking. Their connections bought deal flow. Those of us from public universities mostly went into trading. It’s why it’s been looked down on within Wall Street since basically ever.
> I’ve only ever seen Bloomberg terminals outside of office settings in the apartments of wealthy children
Parents buying their kids Bloomberg terminals aren’t looking for them to get into trading, they’re training them to start a hedge fund.
(I’d also guess a minority of folks with a BB are traders. It’s really more of a vetted calling card.)
You know _traders_ who came from wealthy backgrounds? That's a completely incongruous outcome in my experience. At least in the markets I'm aware of from my career (commodities and fx) the trading component has effectively always been a middle class activity. Something that the kids of cops and plumbers did if they didn't want to go into the family business.
That has changed in the last 20 years or so but only because those jobs have effectively gone away. They are the factory jobs of the finance world. They succumbed to the automation impulse that started in the 80s and reached its zenith in the early 2010s. Traders basically don't exist anymore, a computer can do the job much more effectively. So much so that I was shocked when I _encountered_ a real live trading desk as part of a recent job move.
