>all you christian traders are going to hell!!! uh oh!!!! Applies more to catholic traders, IMO. This a cultural thing, and actually, trading is less popular in catholic countries. As an example, there are prop firms in UK, Germany, Swiss, but there are not any in France nor in Italy, the oldest catholic countries. Interesting to note that the Sharia requires the same from Muslims. Some subsidiaries of large US corps use islamic banks, since these charge no interest to muslmims and very little to friends of muslims. OHLC
I'm not even religious, but darkhorse already addressed this. According to him, this was a misinterpretation that was enforced as law for centuries.
interest. there's a subject I want to devote some meditation to. I've been thinking for a long time about how excessive debt promotes mediocrity -- how so much productivity is devoted to paying interest. Not that interest is bad, but, then again, if it becomes your master.... {"bad money chases out good."} Anyway, Joseph foresaw a famine and advised Pharoah to go long grain, so that they could be sellers during the Seven Lean Years. If usury is intended to defraud a borrower, then down with it. If a trader 'supplies the demand and demands the supply,' he is doing mankind a service. He is acting as 'The Invisible Hand.' Nothing could be more proper.
daytraders are part of the program. buy, sell. capital in, capital out. someone hits your bid, or you hit theirs. add liquidity, remove liquidity. price is discovered, experimented with, tested, modified. repeat process. In a fine Swiss watch, there are gears of many sizes. Mechanisms to measure days, hours, minutes, and seconds. all are necessary to make up the whole. How many hours would there be, if there were no mechanism to tick off the seconds?
That daytrading has become part of the "system" doesn't mean that the system couldn't function without it. Could we survive without stocks being traded by daytraders? We do quite nicely on Saturday and Sunday, and before 8:30 p.m. and after 4 p.m. eastern time during the week. Swiss watches? I think the digital age has replaced them for those who want the most precise time, be it hours, minutes, seconds, tenths of a second, hundreths of a second....etc. Someone in an earlier post in this thread mentioned the specialists as perhaps being day traders, but it has been proven that electronic trading systems can replace the specialists. The specialist system is just an antiquated good old boy club, that has enough clout and works closely with the big brokerage houses to keep the game dishonest and in place.
Electronic systems (assuming you mean 'order matching') do not replace the specialist -- they merely decentralize him. Markets are still made. If anything, Electronic order matching systems have increased the role of daytraders in the essential function of making markets.