The thing that beats me with the current environment is that with low volatility, medium and long term trading are still good, as ever. I just can't understand where lescor and co. are getting their consistent intraday RTM opportunities from.
I don't trade with that group, nor do I know exactly what they're up to... but, MR is not dead and works just as it always has. Granted, my last few years have been slow, but, this is a cycle. As long as there is a supply & demand, MR will work.
No need to get your panties in a bunch, I said "or", I didn't say with certainty that he wasn't profitable anymore. I think traders who trade stocks were probably not affected by the large drop in volatility in most markets, you will always find volatility/range in individual stocks if you look hard enough.
lescor - glad to see you're still doing well! for individual stocks - check out ICPT's movement. not related to mean reversion, but for point movement. there's people who made good money after the news came out - both long and short.
He said he did 200-300k the previous year before, so it's okay not great. To be honest and I am not having a dig at Corey here, it's not worth it. If you are a graduate from a good college/university and work your way up, in your late 30's, you should be at about 200k. I know many of my classmates, who are in their mid to late 30's and have now hit VP level at various firms across multiple industries. Note: I said the word good, not some crapola degree from a shitty college. You can get all that without all the psychological trauma that comes from trading and worrying about whether your strat will continue to work to pay your bills,etc. Not to mention that having a stable income has many benefits when it comes to taking loans or mortgages. IMO in such a case, 200-300k is simply not worth it. Now if you didn't go to college, have a manual job and no real prospect of making more than 50-60k in your lifetime, then go for it but otherwise, anyone with a strong educational degree, i would strongly dissuade them from going into daytrading, at least not in this environment. To those who have just graduated, if you have a decent degree, learn to leverage on your educational achievements. If you really want to trade, go and get an institutional trading job, not staying at home knocking out pennies.
you make a number of assumptions there... first of which is everyone lives in a large metro area where such salaries (and corresponding expenses) are that high. Lescor lives somewhere in Canada, many of us live in small rural areas where no degree on earth offers a salary much greater than $100k annual. With corresponding far lower costs of living. personally speaking, I wouldn't take $10,000,000 yearly salary to live inside any large metro area, anywhere on earth. Did that before, and it ain't worth the brain damage to live in some concrete jungle with people piled on top of each other for anything less than $100 million annual. so salaries and incomes and living expenses vary greatly, while the same trader can make whatever they do, wherever they choose to live life.
LOL, are you serious? Most people never make 200-300k annually in their lifetimes. Not to mention he has no one to answer to but himself. If he felt like jetting off to Europe for a two week vacation on a whim no one would even notice. The 200-300k he makes is far superior for so many reasons to someone who is salaried etc. I would take 100k a year trading over 1 million working in the corporate world.