what you say makes good sense but the VPA is working very well with this volume ; i made 50 pips so far today and i am trading like a pro buying low selling high so.....maybe it is not absolute volume that counts, but relative volume,because that is what shows or exposes how the pros make fools out of retail
It was broke ... the options markets are in no way comparable to what they were 10 years ago. The fact that Timber Hill / Interactive Brokers got out of their core business last year should tell you something ...
the VPA is working very well with this volume ;so that can only mean IT IS THE BROKER WHO IS THE MARKET MAKER IN MY CASE. SOMETHING WHICH WOULD NOT SURPRISE ANYONE
cannot blame the broker for taking the other side of my trade....in fact cannot blame anyone who takes the other side of my trade. i tried myself to take the other side of my trade but i did not make money...but my broker loved it he made double brokerage
I was vol-arbing over a 30-something series in the first two months of DIA by semi-marketmaking. Two things happened: spreads got closer and closer erasing my advantage; secondly: IB started to charge for changes/cancellations. I used to send about 1000 quotes each day to the market of which about 850 where changes/cancellations. Litterally overnight my profitability disapeared since I was making about 1 to 3 cents theorerical edge on average on my options.
Xela, I partially quoted you and I hope it is not out of context.I will delete this post immediately if it is taken that I parsed your post out of context. Are there any retail traders making a living from it? Can you point to any? This is an honest question. I can imagine there are because of the many that are trading forex. But I agree with you the many are "not informed". ES P. S. I enjoy your posts throughout ET and read them when I see them.
After trading forex for ten years i am convinced, that the market only objective is to make a monkey out of me,something apparently not very difficult to do
One honest question deserves another: can you point out any engineer who after studying books for 2 months makes a living?; can you point out any sales man who after reading two books on marketing, manages to make living selling something. The list goes on and on.... the answer to your honest question is that it is not easy to make money....unless you are the Fed
I'm sure there are, but probably can't prove it ... I did, myself, for over 3 years (with hindsight, I should have switched to futures much earlier than I did), and I don't for a moment imagine that I'm the only one! Not in public, anyway ... here's the thing: nobody (or at the very least, surely "almost nobody") with enough capital to trade forex futures on CME is going to prefer to trade spot forex? And you don't need all that much capital to trade futures. When I say "all that much" I mean only that anyone "making a living" from trading is clearly going to have enough. (Maybe that's location dependent, actually, and I shouldn't state it as a "fact"?). I think there are (or were) up to a couple of people (I mean literally, probably, one or maybe two) members of Babypips who are making their livings ... I don't know to what they extent they trade/spot and they're not "people I can point to" anyway - they're just "anonymous forum members". There are, of course, some spot currency pairs that don't have equivalent futures to trade, and specialists in those (whom I imagine to have "specialist local economic/fundamental knowledge" or something similar) may be trading spot, rather than futures? It's perhaps not helpful at all, and I certainly don't want it to sound like a "criticism" of the question at all, but my overall feeling about this question is something like "Well, there won't be many, will there? But that doesn't mean you can't". It reminds me (slightly!) of people here in discussions about TopStepTrader who want to belittle TST and ask for evidence that anyone has retained a funded account for as long as a year, and the answer is "Well, they wouldn't, would they?" because once you're fully up and running as a trader, you wouldn't need to continue to pay TST their 20% for ever ... similarly (maybe!) with spot forex, once you're fully up and running as a forex trader, you're going to switch to futures, aren't you, if you can? It took me far longer to switch than it should have done, but then again, nobody else is as stubborn and obstinate as me. (I started off, when I was really young, on spot forex for the same reasons as most people, by the way: I had very little money and wanted to learn and practice on demo, and I found leverage attractive and appealing, and I used to use leverage as high as 1:100.) I've rambled and probably not really answered you at all, really, ES - apologies!!