Great points. HFT has ruined it for a lot of retail trading. Stocks are much harder to trade on a daily basis. heck everything is harder on any time frame. The 6E and 6J move like zombies now. The CME just recently was practically defending HFTs' right to keep their operations obscure. It's all politicized now just like any other national issue. The representatives want to keep their insider trading and hedge fund perks intact after all. The big banks continue to get their free money and cycle the markets on all its HFT fueled pseudo-volume.
you talking about shorterm trading here. anyone feels any pressure in swing trading ? wonder how long will this hft thing survive. less and less victims. Gone couple more white collar phony jobs.
Every 6-10 years you'll get a couple that are exceptionally profitable/easy to trade, other years there is just not much happening. HFT trading is only a problem is you are trading HF.
Just reading through this thread when I noticed a quote from Ericp: "Also, for what it's worth, I'm referring to 3 cents per share traded, so 6 cents per round turn trade. For example, you buy 200 shares at $20, and sell those 200 shares at $20.06 => You have made a gross profit of $12.00 and have traded a total of 400 shares, or 3 cents per share traded. Obviously, commissions and various fees (SEC, ECN, etc) will lower this a bit further." Why would you choose to define cps as half the difference between you buy price and sell price? Would the figure not make more sense if you used 200 shares?
I'll hazard a guess here, unlike in futures where comms are typically quoted as RT and the example would be 200 contracts, with shares it is per transaction, so in his example you have actually traded 400 shares. I don't look at it this way though, I think in trades and percentages, and would book the example as a 200 share trade opened and closed with a profit of 6cps and comms etc amalgamated.
Think in terms of a whole day. If you make $500 after trading 100k shares, you made a half cent per share (500/100000). This is an important stat if you know your costs, which for most is around the half cent mark.