I guess I'm more interested in what the folks who have been trading for, say 20 years or more...but might as well make it inclusive... Are these the toughest markets you've ever traded? Easiest? Or the Same old shit, different day...?
you trade what you see. There are thousands of stocks, and dozens of commodities to trade. There is always something out there for traders that should meet their style. Some commodities are booming. Some have moved in a more normal matter. Look at cotton. Look at hogs. And others
Market gets rough, only when you merely bull or bear. when you think that the market will act like what you think.
I've traded hogs for the past 21 years. Volatility is up and people sometimes get screwed in the meats market. Look at Friday's intraday Hog chart. 2 other locals and I so-called broke the market there, sent it down from 77.0 to 75.85 in about 5 minutes. This produced large profits for the shorts. Profits can easily be had here. You just must trade what you see and not stay married to a position.
There are no tough markets. There are only price gyrations. The more there are and the bigger the price gyrations are, the better the trading. The search for a trend in trading is often to avoid gyrations; this is so when trend is identified as spanning more than one day. Otherwise the up leg or down leg in one gyration in a daily market might be called a mini-trend or short term trend; if so I have no objection to that and don't wish to quarrel over semantics. I always use the term 'gyrations' since it leaves no doubt as to the meaning. The markets on a day trading basis (eg YM, ES, CL) offer a huge number of points. The sum of the legs (up & down) of price gyrations (ie each leg taken as 15 or more points on YM) is much greater than the range taken as the difference between the market session high and the market session low. If you wish to treat the the daily or session range as the days 'trend' and take it as the 'whole' and take the legs of the days gyrations as the 'parts', then the sum of the parts is much greater than the whole. The gyrations cumulatively each day are where the most money lies. This is where you can access or attempt to access the most points each day.
I've found the commodity markets fairly lucrative since the boom got going. I don't see how a huge multi-year price, volume, and volatility boom can be bad for traders.