This is the trap of modern society. Think about what you're doing: instead of anything productive, you thought a good use of your time was sitting there staring at numbers, hoping to find a pattern to make money off of people; who in their own right are using insider information to game a system; which itself is set up to capitalize off the fact that the larger economy has failed, and now all that's left is to just make money off of guessing.

This comment is so patronizing because it's 2008 angst against the financial sector wrapped up in the assumption that the people participating in the financial sector aren't aware of that angst. We're deep in a hacker news comment thread, no one here should be beating the desk about productivity.

I would recommend you look into Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber, where he makes an argument that 50% of American jobs are not only not-productive, but actually harmful. Your argument isn't taken to its logical conclusion yet.

We should be happy to live in a world where a significant fraction of people can conclude that "doing something productive" is not a hard requirement for survival.

True, but hx8 isn't to blame here and was simply trying an interesting experiment. Blame the system instead.

The real trap of modernity is treating "productivity" as some sort of quasi-religious moral imperative.

Finance has always been the largest sector on the planet through every economic environment you have been alive for, I don't really understand why there is a current of this community that acts so divorced from its perpetual and all encompassing existence their whole lives

Despite you being an individual, you reflect an aberration of sentiment here that makes no sense

For example, the larger economy hasn't failed, another view is that this is price discovery of a mispriced agent in the market. A wage worker whose actual productivity isn't valued accurately, and a market based solution has been developed that allows for closer accuracy. More profits to the insider and the copy trader, their available capital and liquidity is derived from their utility to the employment sector and their potential profits with that capital and liquidity is derived from the event's actual utility to the market.

Additionally, the productivity of all agents isn't known, you don't know what they were doing with their time before and it likely was suboptimal already - as in doomscrolling on social media or vegetating on the couch.

Finally, you have no way of quantifying if those lazy things were suboptimal uses of time, or if a completely active other activity was suboptimal or optimal, as this goes into relative utility and schools of ethics.