Quote from Moneyball:
Now that I've spent the last hour or so reading through this, I feel the need to respond.
Perseus, you need to separate the futures market from the underlying. View the corn futures, for example, in a vacuum. For every person who makes $1 on a corn futures contract, someone loses $1 on that corn futures contract (it doesn't have to be that same person who sold that contract- he or she may have made money, but the net result of all transactions in that corn futures market is zero). The fact that they may have made money on the underlying corn is irrelevant. The fact is, the corn futures market, and all other futures markets, are zero-sum. We're not talking about the whole universe of corn markets, we're just talking the corn futures market.