Look Like a Loser, Then Win
Also Dish sold for a dollar, Sam Altman’s negging, a dentist’s tax shelter, PE recruiting, blockchain for DTCC and business-class bribery.
There’s a guy in Kentucky whose job is running volleyball tournaments and whose hobbies are (1) day-trading stocks and options and (2) talking to the media about it. I once wrote about him:
This was a joke, in several respects. For one thing, he apparently did make a ton of money on GameStop, so who am I to criticize. Also, though, it’s not clear how much equity market makers can really target the most lucrative-seeming customers. Ideally, if you were a market maker in stocks or options, you’d ask retail brokers to send you orders from their most degenerate customers, the ones who frequently trade in large size and lose money. But practically speaking you get all the orders and you do the best you can to trade with them profitably. There are things you can do — you can give better prices to brokers whose customers are, on average, worse at trading; you can get the brokers to kick out retail traders who are too sophisticated; you can develop products that appeal to gamblers — but this is a regulated business and you have some obligation to treat all orders fairly. You can’t just trade with the people you most want to trade with. But the people you most want to trade with are, of course, the ones who trade a lot and tend to lose money.