No, hardly. I trade prop. you're totally missing the point. stick with the why the fuck did markets fall that day debate. it's cos market makers are prop traders in disguise selectively fulfilling any duties they claim to. Prop traders don't claim to making markets.
technically everyone is a market "maker" for whatever brief moment their order is in the queue. i can make or break any market i want, in any stock i want, for all of a microsecond, or all day if the stock has no volume, options are a great example of this, set the bid/ask at the price i want to pay/sell and wait for a matching order from the opposite side of the trade buy/sell at my mark. i don't have to sub-penny it, or front-run it, or do any of that crap to set the market. the market is what the market decides. it's not controlled by any one person or entity, so the idea goldman sachs is the market, is just ludicrous. if the market wanted to, it could wipe goldman out in a flash, but as we well know, goldman has the collective intelligence and systems in place to adjust with the market. i'm not sure what the argument is here...
was. and i doubt will not still be, only from a different angle, a different exchange, thus why the lack, or rather, shift in volatility and liquidity to other world markets. i, for one, am looking elsewhere, as should you from what i can ascertain, you sound stuck where you are. goldman's money never sleeps. neither should yours.
Honestly, have the aliens landed? WTF. Do you know who Peter Muller is? He ran PDT. A proprietary trading group within Morgan Stanley. He was one of the biggest liquidity providers in the game. They were an HFT operation. The group made billions. HFT at all the investment banks and prop firms for that matter fall under proprietary trading.
and why did they ban prop trading at banks, cos of large systemic risks. well then conveniently call them market makers, loophole it and watch markets systemically collapse via super leveraged liquidity bubble. (i'm still on the recent thread topic).
That's one of the issues I have with most of these "market makers"! They're really prop firms in disguise. They're playing the public & regulators for fools. The exchanges on the other hand know this very well but since it helps them, they play along. Any firm claiming to be a "market-maker" ought to be regulated, period.