Quote from bone:
RK, I know that you know the point I am trying to get across - nobody other than the retail wonk is taking directional risk these days. This idea of some big trader scalping ES off a tic chart with a MACD does not exist with the big firms. This entire exercise about "Technical Analysis" is mental masturbation for the naive.
RK, you know this to be true: shop around a scalping strategy for backing, or shop around a spread arbitrage strategy for backing. Which one gets the most interest at least in Chicago and NYC ?
So you're saying that nowhere in all of those spreads is a directional bet, even if only implicit?
That seems a bit hard to believe. Somewhere, somehow, you're betting a direction in something, even if it's only a directional bet on the direction of the correlation as it approaches any number of standard deviations from its mean.
You're sounding like a hammer making everything look like a nail here.
Besides, what does the KIND of risk matter, so long as I am being compensated for that risk? If you are right on direction, you get compensated in proportion to your correctness, so what's the argument against taking directional risk? Your compensation for being right isn't discounted relative to other kinds of risk, after all, and that's what matters. One industry I know pretty well is insurance and insurance companies take all sorts of risks of different types and they know that some will be less profitable than others, based on the volatility of the risk and that if a lower volatility risk pays off more it's because of luck, in many respects. Same with financial markets, where someone who does get skilled at picking direction can probably make much more than someone whose skill is in lower-risk activities with less volatility, like spreads. If big banks are doing more spreads and less directional betting, all that really means to me is that they are willing to accept lower returns, for whatever reason. It could be that the people who are good at directional risk are not going to work for them, so that there is as much directional risk being taken as ever, it's just more spread out over a wider number of firms.
I'll be the first to admit my knowledge of spreads is limited (and probably shows) but I do understand risk quite well and I know what makes sense when you talk conceptually about risk and how it relates to the spectrum of returns that can be generated.
None of which validates the content of this thread, of course! I'm just sayin'.