Everyone should be familiar with Marx’s essential criticisms of capitalism.
In summary, while constant capital (machines, workhouses, and such) is a necessary factor for production, it produces no profit. Profit only comes from variable capital (labor). With automation, less labor and hence less value goes into each good. Increased productivity means that more use values, but those commodities are cheaper in real value*.
It’s not true that more useful goods means less labor is necessary. In the commodity economy where valorization in the highest aim, there can never be enough work. While socialized production would negate this horrible fact, capitalism always wants more labor to exploit.
Yet, the market compels continual automation to give individual capitalists an edge. This process leads to less and less value going into goods and more and more constant capital compared to variable capital. Even if the gross mass of profit grows (which is what the capitalist cares about), the relative profit from production perpetually decreases. And the problem of too much stuff calls for destruction: planned obsolescence, destruction of goods while people have needs unmet, and, of course, wars.
*with inflation, l monetary wealth increases quantitatively without real wealth increasing
It's all financed via exploitation (except for rent, with different logic attached). Dividends are literally exploitation of workers as they come from company profits unpaid for labor.
Trading works slightly differently, imagine a blackbox with input cashflows (retirement funds mainly, dividends, coupons, investments) and output cashflows (retirees, capital repatriation). Inside the blackbox traders do their stuff, moving money from one line to the other, equilibrating expected profits (big funds), or providing liquidity (medium funds) or taking risks (small ones)), but all in all the sum of total profits of all traders inside whole world would be equal to input minus outputs cashflows. There is inherent inequilbrium due to required payments being percentage wages, while older people may not be in that exact percentage, but largely the new money inside the system comes from profits and coupons which again comes from profit which come from exploitation.
say you bought an otm option and cashed out a million bucks, who did you get it from exactly?
On the surface your counterparty is likely a bank, so you took money from a bank. But bank doesn't sell one option to lose money, it sells whole ladders of options, and unless extremely cool stuff happened, their algorithms have sold option in other range which didn't get triggered, and they still made money. So did you take money from other traders, who were unlucky? In a way, but they also bought options with a goal. While retail trading options is not new, large orders are typically big hedgefunds who either have insider info or need to lower risks in a timeframe to not get margin called (the original purpose of options)/escape position. But they have to do that stuff cause they are leveraged out, and they are leveraged out because profit rate on 1x leverage just isn't there (why would you tie up yourself in 30y old bonds 5%yoy, when you can buy a restaurant for expected 25?). So not only leverage flows from expected profit rate, the money of the fund itself comes from either profits or voluntary contributions (retirement funds or whatever), and the money of the profitable option trade comes from either someone doing same shenanigans and losing or someone saving their ass, because they got too greedy.