Oct

3

Zero sum game: for every $ that wins the same amount will be lost. REALLY? you bought at 7 sold to me at 10 I sell at 20 and the contract goes off the board and delivered at 22 who lost? We lost that we could have made more $$ but where is a net loss?

Steve Ellison comments:

Adverse selection can make us all feel like losers. If I sold at 10, I should have held to 22. Or I should have put on more size. If I bought at 7, and it went to 5, that would have been even worse.

Jeff Watson goes literary:

But Yossarian still didn't understand either how Milo could buy eggs in Malta for seven cents apiece and sell them at a profit in Pianosa for five cents.

[ … ]

Milo chortled proudly. "I don't buy eggs from Malta," he confessed… "I buy them in Sicily at one cent apiece and transfer them to Malta secretly at four and a half cents apiece in order to get the price of eggs up to seven cents when people come to Malta looking for them."

"Then you do make a profit for yourself," Yossarian declared.

"Of course I do. But it all goes to the syndicate. And everybody has a share. Don't you understand? It's exactly what happens with those plum tomatoes I sell to Colonel Cathcart."

"Buy," Yossarian corrected him. "You don't sell plum tomatoes to Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn. You buy plum tomatoes from them."

"No, sell," Milo corrected Yossarian. "I distribute my plum tomatoes in markets all over Pianosa under an assumed name so that Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn can buy them up from me under their assumed names at four cents apiece and sell them back to me the next day at five cents apiece. They make a profit of one cent apiece, I make a profit of three and a half cents apiece, and everybody comes out ahead."


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2 Comments so far

  1. Dekalog on October 3, 2025 6:41 am

    For the buyer to buy at 7 there must be a short seller at 7 too. It is this short seller who realizes a loss on the contract of -15 when the contract settles at 22.

    Of course, if the short seller is a commercial hedger they won’t necessarily suffer this loss as they can now sell the underlying at 22, thus offsetting the -15 loss and getting their original, desired selling price of 7. In this case, the “loser” is the perhaps retail buyer who now has to pay 22 for something they could have earlier bought for 7.

    This is futures contracts 101.

  2. Edward Lam on October 6, 2025 4:25 pm

    I guess the trick in markets is that alpha is measured against time - so if your rate of return and return on capital is lower than anothers’, you are losing out…

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