> To traders, whether day traders or high frequency or somewhere in between, Wall Street has nothing to do with creating capital for businesses, its original goal. Wall Street is a platform. It’s a platform to be exploited by every technological and intellectual means possible.
Just because the day to day work of traders on Wall Street has been abstracted away from it's original intention doesn't mean that it doesn't continue to serve that function. When working in any large system, your focus can be absorbed by whatever smaller task you are working on, and you can loose sight of what your piece of the puzzle does. When working on a software team of many hundreds of developers, it's easily possible that the code you are working on is not at all specific to the problem you're solving. That doesn't mean that your work isn't helping to solve the problem.
The financial system is very complex, and I won't pretend to have the expertise or knowledge to explicitly explain the service that high frequency traders, for example, are providing. The way Wall Street currently operates might not be the most efficient system for allocating capital. But I don't think that you can immediately write off modern trading on the basis that it doesn't directly deal with the original purpose of Wall Street.
Just because the day to day work of traders on Wall Street has been abstracted away from it's original intention doesn't mean that it doesn't continue to serve that function. When working in any large system, your focus can be absorbed by whatever smaller task you are working on, and you can loose sight of what your piece of the puzzle does. When working on a software team of many hundreds of developers, it's easily possible that the code you are working on is not at all specific to the problem you're solving. That doesn't mean that your work isn't helping to solve the problem.
The financial system is very complex, and I won't pretend to have the expertise or knowledge to explicitly explain the service that high frequency traders, for example, are providing. The way Wall Street currently operates might not be the most efficient system for allocating capital. But I don't think that you can immediately write off modern trading on the basis that it doesn't directly deal with the original purpose of Wall Street.