Not quite, as a trader the market (Mr Market) is your boss. haha. On each trade Mr Market decides if it will be profitable or not. Sometimes he decides the next 5 or more trades will be losers and you have just stand there and take it.
I think your logic is flawed. You think you know what is productive, and what is not. But you don't . Communism and socialism just think as the way you think. They want to eliminate things that are not productive to the society. But it turns out what they want to eliminate are really productive to society and what they promote are detrimental to society。 In human history there was some country that deemed commerce as not productive to society because commerce don't produce anything and it only makes profit by trading, so it doesn't help society. So the country suppressed commerce and promote agriculture. But it turn out the western industrial revolution evolved from commerce and the country suppressing commerce could not evolve into industrial revolution by itself because its commerce was too weak and the country‘s civilization fell far and far behind western world. The lesson is, if you want to eliminate things that you think are not productive to society, then you are doing the things that are harmful to society.Because you never know what are really productive to society. As Adam Smith said: everyone pursues his best interest legally, the society gets its best interest.
If you can make a living by trading, then you make a career. You don't make a career by trading because you can't live on it.
I go by the standard: if this profession vanished, would the world look the same, better, or worse? If speculative traders vanished, how would the world look? What about murderers? Teachers? Venture capitalists? Shop clerks? Vagabonds? It’s just my way of looking at things.
In history the country believed if commerce vanished, the country would get better. In modern world everyone knows commerce is a good thing but in ancient time the popular view was that commerce was not productive to society and it only made a few merchants rich. I guess when crypto just emerged most people didn't think it was productive to society and currently still some countries think so and they prohibit crypto( as India and China).
"The world's oldest profession" (in the bible too) exists because there is a need. And for as long as the world has existed there have people trying to stop it from happening. Some just never learn, even from centuries of past failures - trying to impose your will/opinion/uptight morality on others.
Alchemy emerged as some people wanted to get rich quickly by trying to transform things into gold. At that time it did not look productive to society, did it? Well , it later greatly helped the generation of science of chemistry。
The standard posed is basically BS. 80%+ of jobs in the modern economy are just run-of-the-mill corporate grinds or socially useless bullshit jobs rather than living out some grand social purpose. Nor is having a "useful job" a guaranteed ticket to happiness, e.g. I've read that close to half of doctors are unhappy with their jobs. Trading offers complete autonomy, constant challenge, a nearly endless canvass for experimentation (everything from value investing to automated crypto arbitrage), the possibility of large financial rewards, and (if successful) the means to provide well for a family regardless of personal characteristics, family background, education, connections, etc. There are few things in life I enjoy more than engaging with the markets, and what someone else thinks of that is irrelevant.
That is absolutely not true. Whoever made that quote has absolutely no understanding of what trading is and is/was obviously in the trading business for the wrong reason himself. We traders are business people; we are not gamblers (not by the way that I and many of the traders treat trading and if you trade with a gambling mentality then that's something else) exactly the same as other business people who are in the business of making goods or providing services. At the end of the day and/or after I stop trading, I will come away with the pride and the satisfaction that I have provided for myself and my family by not relying on others but by my own hard work and perseverance in succeeding to make positive returns on the capital that I invested into asset markets, very much the same as business people everywhere. After I stop trading one day, I will be proud of myself that I made it by having carved out my own career path independently weathering storms people have no clues about, being part of and at the same time writing financial history albeit with my very tiny trading endeavours but at least not through a mundane 9-5 job doing the same old thing everything submitting to mediocre and clueless bosses who really ended up there because they knew how to kiss and backstab better. After I stop trading, I will be proud of myself that I have succeeded in building my financial wealth and my own life with my own design, my own skills and my own thoughts and not by following a system being in a rat race climbing some ladders. I am outside of the system and I did it my way. This is what ultimately what everybody wants to achieve in their life in that they lived their life their way and I would've succeeded in doing that. After I stop trading, if my mind is not plagued with dementia, I would have plenty of war stories to tell, and what do the rest of the working mass have to say? "Oh, I showed up at work at 9:00 AM, I filed some paper, entered some data, had some meeting and I went home". That's basically their stories. And most of the time, they wouldn't even remember what they did everybody for work. It's as if they lived their entire life in a coma. Not me, I would remember every single day of my working life because it's all in my charts and in my trading history. I can honestly look at a chart and I can tell you every single trade I made, entered at which price, exited at which price and why I made it at every single nick and cranny of a candlestick on the chart, why I succeeded or why I failed and that's more than anybody can say about their every day of their working life. Can they remember every single piece of paper that they pushed? Every single person that they talked to? Every single data that they entered into the computer? They basically passed their whole life as a robot because in about 20-30 years, their work would indeed be replaced by a robot whereas my work is still original because I am beating all the trading bots. So besides the money and income, I would have plenty to show for, more than about 90+% of the population. And as to building something or producing something, what 99% of the people including traders don't realize is that we traders produce something that is far more precious and important than anything else in the world: Information. We also provide liquidity for the flow of capital in the market. Our trading endeavours, no matter how trivial or small, we provide price information and we help achieve price completeness. These are two of the most important tasks fulfilled by the market; it's basically one of the fundamental reasons why markets exist; it's to provide value information of an asset to the entire society; it's to let everybody know how much an asset is worth and based on that the society to plan their economic policy, monetary policy, everything accordingly. Because of our trading endeavours, no matter how trivial it seems, we provide the information on the price of an asset or commodity to let the society know at a specific date and time, how much an asset or commodity was worth because at that specific date and time, a trade happened at a particular price. With the price information that we provide, we also help achieve price completeness. Because of our trading, the market is more seamless and smooth because at every single time interval, there is a smoother transition from one price to another with no interruption. The price history of an asset is not a digital jump from one price to another but of a seamless analog progression that provides a more complete picture of how an asset is valued at all times of the day when the market is open. Yes true, without us retail traders, the market would've still existed fine and the price history would've still been complete but we retail traders made it more complete and thorough that the valuation of larger entities based on these assets prices is more accurate and precise. The market is also a place where transactions take place for companies to raise capital, for investors to invest their excess funds. We retail traders are there to provide liquidity to ensure there is someone else on the other side of the transaction. Retail trader volume now makes up 25% of the total trading volume in the equity market. https://www.bnymellonwealth.com/articles/strategy/the-rise-of-retail-traders.jsp#:~:text=Retail investors' share of total,becoming long-term market participants. In other words, 1 in 4 transactions are conducted with retail traders. With the increase in participation of retail traders, with the added liquidity, everybody is able to enjoy narrower spreads thus netting higher capital raised by companies and at the same higher investment for investors. Because of the increased liquidity provided by the retail traders, capital can also be raised not just in higher amounts but also in more timely manner too because there is also somebody there ready to trade. So whether in terms of individual accomplishment or contribution to society at large, retail traders are far from "nothing left to show for it except for money" and " build nothing achieve nothing". We retail traders have come a long way and are now facilitating the two most fundamental functions of a market, providing price information and liquidity. The only reason why somebody would characterize retail traders as stated in that quote is only because he has no idea what trading is nor what it entails and its impact, most likely due to the fact that he is not a trader. People leave the trading profession for all kinds of reasons but it shouldn't be because trading achieves nothing.