[cashewchoo]

I'd argue that options trading is worse than gambling. At least the one-armed bandit only gives the house a slight statistical edge.

Option traders - real ones, mind you - are sophisticated armies of statistics PhD's. I suspect their statistical advantage over Robinhood option warriors is probably a lot more than "slight".

[totalZero]

> Option traders - real ones, mind you - are sophisticated armies of statistics PhD's

Oh? I guess they forgot to ask me for my PhD at the door when I came to work for the first time.

[jawilson2]

My team of traders, quants, and devs is over 50% PhDs, so it isn't that far off. The point is that we have an army of people very good at math working 10+ hours per day analyzing volatility, backtesting decades of data, and shaving microseconds off of execution time. Someone playing with options on Robinhood isn't in a different league, they are playing a different game.

[fractionalhare]

Yeah, lol. Love reading all these myths about the finance industry regurgitated on HN. Most options traders I know don't have a PhD. Of the subset that do, it's usually more multidisciplinary than just stats because there's a lot more to derivatives pricing than just probability theory. Masters degrees are really common though.

Reading HN, you'd think every quant trading firm had the exact same culture and hiring practices as RenTech.