Yes, they can and will always provide value in a free market economy. The very fact we have investing services for common stock avows to this. You can complain that a common man cannot walk into the trading floor on Wall Street to make a transaction but the efficiency of the free market would be completely bogged down if it was not represented by trading services.
The best we can hope for is a competitive system where individuals like sdr provide an honest service, in which we will pay more if we had focused all our learning for a long time (assuming we were smart enough to pull it off). But as any consumer, we often pay a little bit more because it is not our “unique ability” to know this market otherwise we would make it our career. We wander over to Costco and Home Depot rather than buying from the Samsung/PepsiCO/Fisher directly. If you feel bad about it, you can always pick up some of their bonds on the market and hold them till maturity to make up some of that markup (as you can with home builder as well btw).
Don’t take your anger out on these middlemen. Find one that is honest to deal with and be happy for that.
