A reality television show based on hedge funds looks as mis-timed as all those property programmes that are beyond their show-by dates. But is BBC2’s Million Dollar Traders intended to make us envy hedge dealers or hate them?

The Apprentice, Alan Sugar’s programme setting business-linked tasks for contestants, was criticised for giving a false impression of real commerce; now Million Dollar Traders, the Monday night series, gives an equally misguided picture of high (or low) finance.

Giving eight amateurs a trading screen and a stock of cash and expecting them to outwit the markets is either trivialises what hedge funds do or irresponsibly encourages desperate and daft viewers to lose what money they still have.

Sugar’s series – though a mix of Big Brother and the Generation Game - have some relevance to business; it is hard to see what this hedge-fund programme has to offer in entertainment or education. But if anyone thought making quick gains was easy, Million Dollar Traders dispels the idea and highlights the long hours and hard graft. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.

The hedge-fund apprentices have been given real cash by real hedgie Lex Van Dam who, like Sugar, is too busy making his own millions to meet the rookies other than to swear at them for (not surprisingly) losing his money.

The programme was shot in August 2008 when Freddie Mac was collapsing, bringing down the rest of the banking system, and Van Dam’s man in the dealing room complains that this is the most difficult market. In fact, with markets moving 5 per cent in a single day, it is ideal for hedge trading even if the scope for losses is as great as the prospect of gains. The rookies who dealt in Bradford & Bingley and HBoS could have made mints if only they had taken short rather than long positions.

Perhaps Van Dam could devote a trading room to a television programme because business is so thin, but allowing in the cameras only shows what a pointless and fickle occupation hedge trading is. It exposed the short-termism of a parasitic sector of financial services where profits are expected in minutes rather than weeks. No wonder the regulators shortly afterwards banned shorting stocks like HBoS and B&B.

Exactly why the TV hedge-traders were given real money is hard to see: hey could have executed dummy trades without knowing there was no real loss. But the programme could just as easily have been shot in a betting office with eight punters who know nothing about horseracing and who get excited or frustrated as they win or lose money.

By the end off the series we will know if Van Dam lost money, but long before then the hedge-trading sector will be the real loser because these programmes are opening a closed world to a wider public who will question its ethics and purpose. Van Dam should regret seeking the publicity.

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