Here’s a bomb for the trading room floor: Is after-market securities trading rent-seeking?

I’ve been thinking about the connection of poker to securities trading: Are they both rent-seeking?

Poker is. In a vacuum (no rake), poker is zero-sum – no new wealth created – and rent-seeking in the form of error-mining: I make my money on your mistakes.

Is securities trading different? I’m not talking about venture capitalism, which definitely does produce new wealth. And as with poker, leave the SEC out. Is there anything about after-market securities trading that is wealth-creative in the way poker is not?

Consider:

1. Wealth is dinner, material values brought into existence by human capital, typically for profit. Denominated values are fungible but indigestible.

2. New wealth comes from new production.

3. Production-support is production.

4. Profit-seeking non-productive/non-production-supporting transactions are rent-seeking. (This is a much larger definition than other people use. Like pure capitalism, pure rent-seeking is better understood without the overlay of government coercion.)

Heinlein said there are makers, takers and fakers (D, C and I in DISC, with the Ss taken for granted as usual). Capitalism is making. Rent-seeking is either taking directly by force or taking indirectly by trickery, but the rent ultimately sought is an unearned piece of the maker’s production. If the makers do not produce new wealth, the thugs and the gamblers cannot eat – the plot of Atlas Shrugged.

Am I missing something about after-market securities trading that causes four cows before the trade to come to be five afterward, or am I right that, like poker, the transactions occurring do not produce new wealth or support its production in any way?