I go to Elitetrader every year or so to post a question and yesterday I found myself back again and was shocked to see how little volume there was in the forums. Only 15 threads started yesterday, and it looks like that was a good day. I remember in 2009 there seemed to be a new thread posted every few minutes during the trading day. I did a very unscientific look back at the historical posts for Forums-->Main-->Trades which I believe has the most posts of any. I picked a random weekday or two for each year and counted the number New Threads and here's what I came up with: 2001 3 2002 4 2003 8 2004 9 2005 8 2006 12 2007 13 2008 30 2009 9 2010 6 2011 5 2012 3 2013 3 2014 2 So I was wondering about this and wanted to see if anyone could offer any knowledge or speculation on this (or even stories of how great things used to be). Has traffic moved to another forum? Is it just because market volume is low? Will it come back when volume picks up again? Have the independent traders mostly died off?
HFT has destroyed the industry. Plain and simple. Look no further than Virtu's one losing day in the last six years of trading...and it was only because a programmer screwed up!
I've been analyzing spreads for quite a while and they are unnecessarily terrible in many exchange traded securities. I tried helping the market by offering a better price, but all my bids/offers were front-run by either the price I had entered or $.0001. Nobody can make a market in this environment when someone on the inside has a monopoly/oligopoly on the quotes.
With all due respect for Baron, I think the front page seems build by Martians for Martians. The original design was better imo. No dates, just link to thread or last post + book & brokers reviews. Also, I would make Elitetrader website secure, with the intention to keep the identity of all users private, including from moderators. just my 2c.