Zillow Is Done Trading Houses

I do not want to say that losing a lot of money on a trade is as good as making a lot of money on a trade. It is not. For one thing, if you make a lot of money on a trade, then you have money, which can be used to buy goods and services. For another thing, if you make a lot of money on a trade, then you were at least in some rough sense correct about the trade, and being correct often about big questions is a valuable skill in finance and life.

If you lose a lot of money on a trade, neither of those things are true. And yet there is a certain prestige to it? Being correct is not the whole ballgame. Being important is important. “Important people like to deal with important people,” the Goldman Sachs commandment goes; “are you one?” The most famous JPMorgan Chase & Co. trader of the last decade, the one JPMorgan trader whom many people know by name or at least by nickname, is Bruno Iksil, the London Whale, who is famous for losing $6.2 billion of the bank’s money. Did that work out great for him? No, not really, not at all. But I suspect a lot of people in finance would buy him a drink if they ran into him. He is a celebrity in a way that thousands of traders who have never lost $6 billion are not.