Wall Street Pit – A great example of way regulations tend to protect industries from competition more than help consumers, a great example is the law that prevents hedge funds from disseminating their performance. This allows funds to create massive amounts of survivorship bias via the use of several funds within one main brand, and it’s much harder to quantify this because by law they can’t tell you how they do.
One can imagine if more people were aware of Madoff’s returns, and his purported assets under management, lots of people would have figured out it was a Ponzi scheme just as Markopolos did. More people would have learned about pairs trading in the 1990s via the fat returns, and this would have created more efficient trading exchanges faster (they were arbing the pre-internet retail flow).
