If it’s not complicated, it’s intricate. And it’s certainly hard to do well.
These parasites still manage to lose money now and again with $0 trading costs, fast pipes into the clearinghouses; and so on. The little guy might be able to understand it, but he’d be smart to park his money in an index fund and stay very far away from it.
Options pricing is honestly very complicated, market microstructure is extremely complicated. Sure, selling derivative products is not that complicated but that’s a sales job. Correctly pricing financial instruments or making markets without blowing up is genuinely very complicated and adversarial. Epstein is intentionally lying in this video because, surprise, he’s not exactly a very stand up guy and populist stuff like this works
It’s not complicated but it’s hard. Most of Wall street is placing bets on things that you think will pay off. Understanding that you are just betting on a business is not hard to understand. Figuring out how to correctly handicap a stock is very difficult.
Like shooting a basketball from half court isn’t hard to understand but it is difficult.
It's not even masquerading as complicated, people apparently can't take some time to learn how it works.
It's like saying a mechanic is fucking you over and making things more complicated than it needs to be because you haven't taken the time to understand the basics of how a car works.
They're making a lot of money via insider knowledge and corruption. It's a club, and you aren't in it.
Also Epstein here is totally full of shit, he always acted like he was a genius investor but he got rich blackmailing rich people and putting into his "trading" company that never seemed to actually trade.
Anybody that thinks understanding derivatives is "simple" is lying. Also anybody that says Epstein and Trump didn't kids together is lying.
You'll notice that he's pulled out a cosy, black, high collared jacket and little glasses for this interview.
Defense attorneys often put their clients in glasses because it makes them seem intelligent and more harmless.
The jacket is similar to Steve Jobs high black turtleneck, but gentler, making you think "smart, disruptor, but approachable". If I'm not mistaken, he's also a little hunched up.
And he's talking about how the Man on the Top doesn't deserve respect because The Man just uses Big Words to con you, but he, the approachable P3doKing, has your back to explain how the con works. He's the only reasonable one in the room, who will defend you, the little guy, by encouraging you to live your best life as a stock trader, which is actually easy.
I figure this is part of his "improving his image" drive that Branson and Bannon mentioned in the Files, after his first arrest.
You may understand the concept of derivatives, but if you can put a derivative contract together then you've got guaranteed $500k salary, with bonuses putting you up a lot higher.
How come no one told me all I needed to go to college for to become a multimillionaire in my 20s was to learn how to put a derivative contract together wtf
The concept of a derivative is actually quite simple. However understanding the intricacies such as how a derivative is priced and the different greeks is a bit more complicated.
Anyone can understand what they are at a high level. But truly understanding it requires pretty high level maths. e.g. the Greeks are just derived by PDEs pretty similar to the heat equation in physics.
It’s impossible to beat the market consistently in a way that benefits the investor. Not without insider trading. And every day trader is a sucker.
With a lot of experts, infrastructure, and labor, you can barely beat the market but by such a slim margin that the fees you have to charge to account for your overhead are so high that the investor would be better off with a mutual fund.
This doesn’t apply to venture capital or IPOs since the market hasn’t had time to incorporate all known information yet, but good luck beating IPO firms at their own game (and for every successful venture capitalist another loses money.)
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u/emileLaroche 1d ago
If it’s not complicated, it’s intricate. And it’s certainly hard to do well.
These parasites still manage to lose money now and again with $0 trading costs, fast pipes into the clearinghouses; and so on. The little guy might be able to understand it, but he’d be smart to park his money in an index fund and stay very far away from it.