Something that's bugged me for a long time was this realization that trading, or say monetary accumulation in general, is a highly competitive beast by nature. And what I mean by that is that not everyone can be wealthy, just as not everyone can be a manager at a company. If everyone suddenly had more money, the value of money itself would decrease due to the fact that we're all trying to still buy the same goods, i.e. the price of goods would increase due to the forces of supply and demand. So this illusion that we can all become enriched trading is a false illusion. For the longest time, my conclusion was therefore that the primary way for everyone to get ahead was to improve technology, which tends to lift all boats. We'll ignore the tradeoffs to technology for the time being, such as the cost to our health due to mass manufacturing and agricultural production. But on a basic level, we're housing, feeding, entertaining, and educating more people across the globe due to technology (true wealth creation), not due to people simply having more money in their pockets.
Even innovations in finance such as crypto, microlending, and venture capital are not wealth creators, but wealth distributors. Money is able to move into the hands of people who can create value or flip that money in ways they previously couldn't, leading to more unlikely sources of wealth. However, in spite of all of this, we have seen no end to trends in wealth inequality. Yes, you can be a farmer from Ghana who pitches a great idea on Shark Tank and eventually gets rich, but that person simply becomes an outlier who joins the millionaire's club. They may even hire some people and uplift their lives, in which case they have made a small dent in the wealth inequality problem.
There is an argument to be made that mass entrance into entrepreneurial activity will result in better wealth equality, but there are often tons of barriers to entries (knowledge, capital, entrenched customer bases, required human resources, etc).
But what about trading? With the advent of easy access to online platforms, and more recently, funding programs, there is an inkling of a chance that trading itself will be a widely appreciated means of supplementing one's income. And in the process, we'll potentially see improvements in society as a side effect of the discipline and emotional awareness/regulation required for trading success. This may sound minor now, but with the growth of the popularity of trading, one can envision a day where the little guy finally stands a chance of making enough money to live comfortably without being a slave to the asset owners (the 1%). In addition, the 1% are parked in large instruments, without the ability to make nimble decisions and huge % returns that are only possible on smaller accounts. This may be the financial "education" we need to really promote in society, not just the pop-media mumbo jumbo on personal finance. So it turns out my initial gloomy projection of trading being ineffectual on a societal level was wrong, since I didn't take into account that most retail traders are essentially part of the 99%, competing against the top 1% who are unlikely to benefit from trading due to the nature of how they rely upon relatively illiquid assets for their wealth accumulation. It gets even more interesting when you consider the fact that any form of trading acumen could dramatically increase the quality of living for the bottom 25%. Let's see folks..
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