I think the entire financial market is 'rigged' to take advantage (eat up) small time investors who are looking to get rich quick. All sorts of commissions, order flows, competitions, volume, misleading advertising, lucrative margin choices and promises of get-rich-quick commercials. Then courses, books, programs, forums, news letters, and analysts. In this sense, it is rigged to take advantage of those who do not know better. If you are a simple buy & hold quality stocks or an index fund, no, there's nothing terribly wrong going on here. All the 'games' and 'money pinching' mechanisms out there won't affect an investor who is in it for the 10+ year term and deals with high quality stocks. What would happen to the markets if all the day traders, scalpers, leveraged-players in the world stopped and simply put their money in SPY and went to sleep for 5 years?
Liquidity would drop heavily, spreads would become wider, HFT would have problems and brokers would go broke as commission would drop. If buy and hold would be better HFT would not exist. I personally cannot make the returns I make now, just by buying and holding.
The funny thing is SPY is the best daytrading,scalping etc.. stock. Super liquid and deep market, including the options market etc.. SPY is the king of trading instruments
As long as I can wet my beak in this action and take some home, It wont bother me if someone skims a little off the top. I think TD collected like 1800 bucks in commish, Etrade about 1200 bucks. hey everyone is happy.
I feel the same. Some big brokers match trades internally and don't send them to the exchange, saving fees. To bad they don't rebate traders. The amount is so small, maybe they do...
%% Me 2, market order; after my limit order sits there 2 long LOL[ 2 long = Time period, not a bullish comment even though its a bull market you know in SPY/QQQ-LOL] Its like founder of IBD notes , ''don't quibble about a quarter + miss the move'' In his updated edition he says ''or the decimal equivilent'' NOT a prediction, not rigged, not bank insured
I suspect ETFC and TD do this. I can see it sometimes since I have both trading platforms open at the same time (different computers) but primarily in the options side, SPY moves to fast etc.. for me to see this. Especially for liquid stocks like SPY I bet they do a lot of internal matching, They probably love SPY traders since they get to match internally and have safer accounts on the books that wont be blowing out/margin deficiencies etc.. with more AUM than your typical single ticker trader.
%% I checked out M Webster definition; the markets are not rigged. But Mr Soros said the markets have a bias; sounds like you figured out the bias. NOt a prediction, not bank insured
Well Mr Soros should know a long being a passive investor - I`m sending this Question Out again as to assessing a more reliable answers as well I think that question is a worthy one at best if just to simulate thought towards further Trading Plans.