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Surely those app/games have an obvious social function, entertainment. That is the vehicle through which these Skinner-box like tools are accepted enabling them in a minority of cases to extract relatively large amounts of cash via, eg, IAP.

I, like millions upon millions of others, played both and found them entertaining. They don't appear to return value commensurate with their incomes and have certain strong negative influences on a limited number of players.

The function of hedge funds is to extract worth from the financial markets by riding natural, or forced, fluctuations in the price of securities and other instruments.

It's financial trickery that enables extraction of value without valuable input. There's always some arm-wavey stuff about how they add valuable liquidity but TBH that always seems bogus to the extent that the liquidity gained isn't worth anywhere near the value extracted. As they're meta-trades they may have a damping effect but it seems if an acceleration can be achieved, using lots of leverage, then more gains are created. Encouraging market instability appears to be the way to create greater opportunities for profit - but I'm a layman, perhaps I'm seeing it wrong?

As far as social function it seems that is to hedge the investments of the rich [which term I recognise is subjective] with returns which don't necessarily fall with traditional markets.




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