<i>"HFT is just another market participant... HFT is just another excuse for you losers to whine... blah blah blah..."</i> ---->Never mind any of us individually for a moment, just look at what has become of the entire leveraged equities prop trading industry! Echo used to have a Chicago office with over a dozen traders at that location. Last time I stopped by there almost two years ago, every single guy was gone except for the branch manager- who was in the process of folding up shop and shutting it all down. How are things at Bright these days? I'm sure it can't be much different there either, but please correct me if I'm wrong. If HFT isn't the root cause of the prop equities short-term manual/black-box API/grey-box API trading industry falling off a cliff in recent years, go ahead and explain to me what the 'real reason' happens to be.
--"HFT is just another market participant... HFT is just another excuse for you losers to whine... blah blah blah...".--- it's sounds simple,but reality is a bit more complicated. it is another participant. who happens to have ALL POSSIBLE and impossible TECH advantages + all SEC rules on his side. i can retired today in my mid forties on the money i've made in trading. if i'm a loser..well...don't know who is the winner here. you tell me,how i suppose to jump into a trade,if someone is always on front of me with 0.00000001 "price improvement" and my broker is legally allowed to sell all possible and impossible order info to them, before it can reach the exchange. you tell me,how is it possible for them to cancel and withdraw their 'flash" orders before i can reach them(even when i decide to buy at ask)? i've been saying same thing for years. it didn't happens overnight. slowly,but surely retail trading was squeezed out of the game in favor of those 'another participants' yeah..yeah..i know..adapt or die..i've heard it before. kind of hard to adapt,when all the rules not in your favor,you know..
emg, I respect your contributions to the forum with such witch-hunting threads exposing scammy 3rd party vendors ala "Unregulated educational 3rd party scam vendors". Your slogan is pretty amusing and I still have a smile everytime I see it. I am just curious. Do you count yourself one of the small traders or do you have experience and success trading within the "system"? And conversely, do you believe "90% of HFT firm trading wins. they just win!"
The interesting thing is that profits among HFT firms have been on decline since the Lehman crash! Just Google for statistics.
Yes, I've heard that in the news too. Maybe due to too much HFT saturation and HFT firms competing with each other with other smaller fish participants already scared away, so less pieces of the pie are shared among these ( (first in the (first in the line) ) but retail traders' fills still get screwed ) so maybe "90% of winnings are by HFT firms. Together, they just win!" would be a better emg-like slogan. the news may have been behind reporting the HFT saturation by a few years all this time. and more egregiously so on the problem of HFT overall which was slow to have been taken seriously, before the CFTC and SEC have to really do something about it. (or they don't have to and just find patsies)
so, after all, forex not that bad as noone has supreme manipulation rights unlike US controlled markets. especially crosspairs, where most of my profits come.
Forex, aka virtual market, on retail level is one of the worst. Futures are the best bet for day trading.
i don't trade forex,but i guess so. they(HFT) have no interest in unregulated markets. as i said many times-their 'edge' is a combo of technological advantages + set of rules,made by SEC that was lobbied by them in their favor. give me same ability to place a subpenny orders and see those subpenny quotes in my platform(not 2 numbers after a decimal point as we have right now)and if i still unable to make a profit off it-then you can call me a loser. btw- all of those HFT defenders or adapt or die boys never demonstrate that they actually DID MADE decent amount of money trading. and that their profits are rock stable and not affected by those evil HFT. i've posted my statements openly multiple times here and admitted that my profits are folded at least x10(yes,x10) from where they are 5 years ago. but! it doesn't mean that my systems showing less profits. nope. i simply can't get any shares and get into a winning trade. just like that. i can be right about turning point 10 times in the row during the day,but can't get a 100 f** shares. that's how sophisticated those things are. and off course-all losers are mine,no problem with fills there.