Over the past couple of years, I started learning about investment and securities. Before then, I saw everything related to this space as a black box that I would never be able to understand.
However, the deeper I go, the more angry and disillusioned I feel.
What started as “invest in a company you believe in and grow with it” has turned into a system obsessed with extracting every possible dollar from price movement, no matter the method, no matter the ethics. It’s no longer about funding innovation or helping businesses grow, it’s about speed, leverage, arbitrage, and squeezing edge out of anything that moves.
Entire careers now exist just to profit from volatility itself. Not from creating value. Not from improving products. Just from being faster, more aggressive, more optimised than the next guy.
And it’s not just traditional markets. Look at crypto. In theory it was meant to democratise finance. In practice it’s become a playground for:
- Rug pulls
- Pump-and-dumps
- Influencer scams
- Projects designed from day one to siphon liquidity and disappear
So many people now enter markets not to build, but to extract. The goal isn’t “grow something useful.” It’s “how do I get mine before everyone else does?”
What bothers me most isn’t that some people are greedy, that’s human. It’s that the system rewards greed so efficiently that moral restraint becomes a disadvantage. If you hesitate, someone else front-runs you. If you care, someone else exploits the gap.
At some point, it stops feeling like an engine of progress and starts feeling like an arms race of optimisation divorced from any social purpose.
I know markets are necessary. Capital has to flow. Risk has to be priced. But it feels like we’ve built a hyper-financialised layer on top of reality whose only product is more money for those already inside it.
And it leaves you wondering:
Is this really what “investing” is supposed to be?