Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Where I was going with the service provider, I think casinos are service providers. They’re providing entertainment to their customers. Everybody knows that the games are stacked in the casino’s favor. Similarly, I think you could make an argument—and I think this is probably quite accurate—that RenTech and all other quant firms like them are providing a service to the market, in that they are allowing trades that people want to make to happen faster and at much lower spreads. Absolutely. That is the undeniable, yes, quant funds create value in the world thing, which (I think) it’s very easy to say quant funds provide no value because it’s zero sum, they’re not actually providing the capital to businesses to do something with. They’re purely looking to do an arbitrage or any of the strategies we’ve talked about this episode. But you’re totally right that there is a value to market liquidity. Creating more depth to a market makes it so that if we go back to the era that Renaissance was started, there’s no chance that retail is able to function like it does today with zero transaction fees and people able to invest in all these different companies at near real time. And any single one of us can go buy a security in just about any market, at just about any time of day, pretty much instantaneously, and get a very, very, very granular price on it. None of which used to be true.…

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