Why be an option/futures/day trader when it is zero-sum?
byrneseyeview: It isn't zero sum, any more than manufacturing is zero sum because all you did was expend energy rearranging the same old atoms.Trading well requires you to synthesize information that other people will act on. If oil is too cheap, you buy oil, this raises the price and alleviates the problem. The fact that this causes some people to lose money is material, but it just means that trading is a way to redistribute wealth from people who are usually wrong to people who are usually right. I do not see how anyone could believe that this isn't socially useful.