Markets Are MMOs

The reason we have markets is because the systemic optimization effect of free agents making decisions is generally more accurate than any particular algorithm, not least of all due to computational capacities relative to those possesed by human brains. Markets are the bi-product of the crowd sourcing of logistical optimization problems. In other words, you've got a curve of demand that changes in unpredictable ways, and you can fill spaces under that curve by drawing rectangles. Predicting the curve and directly matching it is very hard to do, but if you let people trade individually, they can adapt on a more granular basis, approaching an ideal of "liquidity". It's great.
If you look back on the history of financial markets versus how they work today, you'll realize that the means of communication completely changes the nature of participation. They used to trade paper, and in order to invest you had to be a real royal jerk wearing a top hat or something, living in London or having an agent for you operating there. Watch Wall Street, that guy spends his day cold calling people and trying to get them to invest in an account he operates. The Internet blew the collective mind of the market, allowing trading to happen both computationally and remotely. It's become possible for due diligence to be done in a more rapid and accessible way. This has changed the nature of the game.
The biggest problem facing the global markets, in my personally opinion as an interaction designer, is not too much constraining regulation or overly-loose, unbalance lack of regulation. The big problem is in the interface. The more accessible a market is, the more likely it is that it will do what it's supposed to do: optimize logistics. People are the fulcrum, so interface accessibility is like the meta-fulcrum, maybe torque, I didn't do well in physics...
The nature of a market in it's rules is the second key consideration. Government constraints are usually the least important factor of the three, for the following reason. If the terms of a market are not conducive to optimization, then it doesn't matter if the market is too regulated or deregulated, problems are going to result. For instance, under one set of terms one could make that argument that commodity futures markets are not conducive to optimizing the efficiency of deliveries; the friction of hedged trading between numerous middle-men can exceed the benefit gained from more efficient pricing. However, it's quite possible that a futures market could be oriented in a way that the end-consumer is paying less of a mark-up than they would were prices less stable. It's a matter of game balance. As many great economists note, the most important terms are transparency and the legal infrastructure to facilitate trust, these are the terms that allow good decision making to occur, they facilitate the self-balancing of the game.
Now, let's step back from serious realism for a minute, and think about what trading securities is like from an experiential point of view. 
The stock market appeals to a balance of conqueror and management styles of play. It's turn-based in that every sale of stock takes a few business days to clear; you can buy again while your funds are unsettled but you can't sell until they do. Lot's of research is involved because the noun array is composed of all the heterogenaity and novelty of the public companies in that given nation. Thers is a level of explorer-type play involved in the more daring stuff, like scoping out penny stocks in cleantech, or small-caps in emerging markets.
The futures market is more strongly a matter of winning at all costs than it is about management, this is because the distribution of cash between traders is zero-sum. You buy a ton of beans for delivery a year from now for, I don't know, let's say $500. If the price of beans goes higher than $500 a ton within that time period, you can sell that contract for a profit. You're basically swimming with the sharks in this kind of market, all your profit is coming directly from other trader's lossses. It's a real-time game as well, with a staggered turn-based mechanic created by the relative expiration of the contracts being traded.
The FOREX is like futures, but with a twist, the supply of the commodity is being created electronically by central banks all over the world, and then by commerical banks, who incidentally operate on the currency markets more than any other class of entity, since they help set exchange rates via arbitrage. Futures represent an obligation to deliver something you could eat or burn or bath in, like gold coins, but foreign exchange trading is like trying to play Q-Bert up the biggest pyramid in the history of man. As a result, there's always a bull-market somewhere. I think this kind of trading has a stronger exploration element than stock and commodities, but it's still dominated by victory-oriented management. I've created a game account on Oanda to play around with this. Data is shifting in real-time, fractions of a penny, fluid real-time.
I'd like to see a market that is fundamentally more equitable, so I decided to design it.