Well, you would have lost out on a lot of innovation for one. I would be willing to bet that nearly half of the world's high performance computing specialists cut their teeth with a trading firm at one point or another. By your logic, there would have been no benefit to video games or going to the moon even though each of these things have helped deliver large amounts of technological advancement.

IE, Facebook is a giant waste of resources but they employ many of the world's smartest engineers. Because of that they've spawned things like ReactJS which has completely changed web development for thousands of other companies.