Businesses might employ people who aren't as productive but have an unique angle which they can use during a crisis when the typical good performers lose their heads. While I haven't run a hedge fund myself nor invested in one, I have seen first hand how allocation is managed and questions about correlations to several indexes and instruments are what matters. Performance is important but secondary because you can just be long with leverage and by the numbers it looks like you're a genius but in reality...
Thanks for your insights. Would you know what are some of these jobs? I will like to pursue them as a career. Wonderful characteristics like fund managers. Collect money like "parasites" during non-productive period without having any fear of losing jobs. I do not doubt you that such jobs exist. But it is very hard to find except in the financial world like asset management.
Well the military in peacetime, clearly parasites. Trillions wasted on a nuclear arsenal we must have wasted because we never used it. Firefighters when there isn't a fire. Oil spill cleanup teams when there isn't an oil spill. The list is almost infinite.
I want to add as a less snarky reply, if you're truly interested in finance, and it appears you are, invest some time into a finance 101 and prob/stats 101 course. There are some great MOOCs that are free taught by top professors from top universities. There is a whole world out there in Modern Portfolio Theory and the efficient frontier based on asset correlations that I think you'd find fascinating. At this point you're profoundly ignorant (and I don't mean that pejoratively) about this subject so you're not in a position to get anything out of what the posters here are telling you about it. It's akin to me arguing with an MD about the proper way to treat post-surgical swelling after brain surgery and telling him that clearly the way their profession handles it is stupid when I don't know the first thing about brain surgery. Any technical explanation he gives me would be wasted on me because I clearly don't even know what I don't know.
You heard it here first: https://www.elitetrader.com/et/thre...et-an-edge-in-the-market.308267/#post-4435240 "I think Paul Tudor Jones' highly publicized move to fire a bunch of people and hire quants marked a short term top for the quant world. In macro trading right now, there has never been a better time to do the type of hard fundamental thinking as outlined in "The Alchemy of Finance" which ironically Paul wrote the forward to..." April 2, 2017