Most of this article is pretty interesting and unusually insightful about quant firms. But I find this sentence to be utterly disgusting.
> Trading is a lottery operated by market makers, and like the lottery its social function is to convert mass innumeracy into funding for better causes.
It’s basically saying “we should have your money because we know better than you”. Maybe true, but I find it a very weak argument for the social function of a quant firm. Especially when lotteries are essentially a form of regressive taxation.