Partly agree. Market makers who take direction bets though usually end up without job mostly because they either got fired for violating their mandates or because they have no clue about direction, a task they were never qualified to engage with in the first place.
Also market making is not as simple as being forced to take positions that end up being profitable. That's a pretty naive view. Market makers make money because above and beyond being smart and trained they see flow in the short term and the more flow crosses their eyes/algorithms the more profitable their liquidity provision.
Also market making is not as simple as being forced to take positions that end up being profitable. That's a pretty naive view. Market makers make money because above and beyond being smart and trained they see flow in the short term and the more flow crosses their eyes/algorithms the more profitable their liquidity provision.
Market makers by definition are supposed to provide liquidity when the public is primarily on one side of the market. Since the public is mostly wrong market makers are forced to buy at bottoms and short at tops. Therefore they are forced into making profits. This is decades old knowledge popularized in books by Ricard Ney. Unlike the public the market makers hedge their risk exposures.
Market makers who make directional bets are eventually out of business, since they are usually high leveraged