On Chess: Game’s finest scary to stockbrokers
The Columbus Dispatch
In the 1990s, Wall Street banks hired several top chess players to trade equities. Among them were former U.S. Open champion Norman Weinstein and a Russian emigre, former Soviet women’s champ Anna Akhsharumova.
Weinstein’s success as a trader at Bankers Trust spurred the institution to recruit other top players.
In the January issue of New in Chess, Harvard professor Ken Rogoff – formerly a chief economist for the World Bank and a chess grandmaster – explained: “Being a trader certainly requires iron nerves, as chess does, and also the ability to concentrate for very long periods.”
I’m reminded of an analogous campaign by Rand Corp. In 1960, at the dawn of the computer age, the company advertised in the Boston area for chess players to learn the art of systems analysis.
In the 1980s, a group of game players, perceived by skeptics as frittering away their time and lives hanging out at the Chess and Checker Club in New York, were organized into a trading group.
Their exceptional ability to make instant, effective decisions in commodity trades terrified competing traders. Some did very well financially.
Source: http://www.dispatch.com
So because it makes them money it’s somehow respectable? I don’t think trading on the stock market has any real value or really help anyone. They also engage in activities like high frequency trading in order to make more money for themselves. It’s only complicated because they wrote all the rules and made it complicated, I cannot see a reason for this trade. Trading on the stock market also isn’t a very fair or fun game and you can’t know if someone is cheating.
I find it sad that some people would equate stockbroking with respectability and chess as “a waste of time”. Money does nothing but allow you to get other people to do things for you or give you things. For everyone that has money there is someone without… so it’s all a zero-sum game.
I think most humans should just quit working so much and maybe they wouldn’t be destroying the world so badly.
That’s a smart move.