Grim future for day trading as a career

as much as i hate to admit it----Truth is that the stock market performs much better under democratic regimes than republicans- but i bet you already know that---

 

During the SOES days, day traders had the advantage--- now they don't-- and look who is crying rather than morphing--- sad but true-- the edge creators have become the edge givers

 

While people have been typing nonsense, the S&P had a 44 point move down, over $2000 per contract.

 

please let us know your secret for following both the S&P and ET at the same time. Do you have a secretary or a trading assistant that informs you while you are trading S&P when someone has posted something on ET you may be interested in?

 

Separate computer and monitor for browsing, multiple monitors with charts and execution on another. I average about 6 signals per day so plenty of time waiting for signal and then waiting for a trade to eventuate. It's not a complicated deal.

 

You are comparing what SOES was back in the day to today's HFT?

 

I tend to disagree with this. If most day traders already lose, then it stands to reason that most of the profits must come from this group. If you eliminate the source of revenue for the few successful traders/entities out there, then they will actually only be hurting themselves.

I'm not saying that patterns won't change, but for this you have to adapt, just like on higher volatility days where the swings are greats, stops might also have to be wider.

If trading got to the point where a human cannot trade and they just packed up and left, the incredibly fast and efficient computers would blow up trying to just out do themselves for very little profit indeed! Right now, they are exploiting human nature, and if this human nature is removed, there is nothing to exploit. You can say that programmed systems still include human nature, which is true, but those quants who programs these things aren't programming with their emotions. So if all you ever had was quants against quants, I think the potential to extract profits from the markets is greatly dimished.

In other words... careful what you wish for! If the markets ever got so unpredictable because of crazy algo trading in order to extract more profits, I believe they won't get the desired effect.

 

In trading, as in sword fighting, there are the quick and the dead.

 

But each opponent should be able to see the other's sword if it is out of its scabbard. Not so with latency arbitrage. (Not a perfect analogy, but you get the idea.)

 

Look at the CL futures during high volatility times and the lowest time frame you can, it's quite apparent that those institutional algorithms trading that are NOT discretionary retail day traders and that they are exploiting one another at speeds and with information which prevents retail discretionary traders from being able to compete.

Institutional trading programs make profits from one another in a different way than the way retail makes profits, institutions will still compete once non-algorithmic retail (soon) is nonexistent in intraday trading, since there's a variety of timeframes the various institutions trade off of.