Can anyone show me, on a chart, which price points were HFT buys and sells and which are human buys or sells, other than by guessing randomly or playing the odds, since 70% of the volume is generated by HFT? No, you can't. Price is price is price is price.
It is impossible to daytrade along side with the HFT. I assume you do not know anything about HFT nor do you have any HFT friends.
How was daytrading different prior to HFT? Specifically, not just some vague statement about "it was easier" or "the market was less volatile" or some other subjective statement. When it comes to markets, either it can be measured or it doesn't exist. I doubt there is a single trader who daytrades now and is not profitable who would be profitable if HFT did not exist.
Depend on the capital. If trader A daytrades in ES with $5000, is it possible to make a living? If trader B daytrades in ES with $500,000, it is possible to make a living. Prior to HFT, algorithmic trading barely existed. What I mean is, algorithmic trading is the new way of trading. Prior to HFT, Hedge Funds dominated the volume. That is no longer the case.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_trading as far as i know HFT is far away from this description of algo trading. this type of algo trading ,described above i, personally using for a decade or so...HFT operates on totally different level using data,speed,commissions that is impossible to get for retail. basically what they use is pure technical advantage of one market participant over another. give me some of it and i will use it for my own profit(and i did,when there was an opprtunity back in a day)..there was few very good discussions about HFT trading here and on IB API yahoo boards. i agree with the statement that they operate in totally different universe. however (once again) it doesn't mean that it's impossible to be consistently profitable for retail guy. that's all i'm trying to say.-it's possible and i'm living proof of that. and i know few more successful retail daytraders traders. but HFT doen't make our lives any easier. they are bad for retail. this statement (again) based on my personal experience.
that's depends on your definition of living. i can live in US just fine on 50K a year..no need for 500K account and ES margin to get there.you can have decent living on 10-20K in many countries around the world..
Your original post stated that day trading was somehow harder now than it was before HFT and didn't say anything about daytrader capitalization. So before HFT someone w/$5000 could make a living daytrading? I mean, what makes daytrading different now than it was before HFT? Assume the daytrader in question has the same amount of capital. Why does that daytrader trade profitably before HFT and not profitably after? The answer, of course, is that HFT plays no role in a trader's profitability. It's a red herring to the real issue, which is that most daytraders lack a coherent and viable strategy. Again, show me tangible evidence on a chart that HFT makes a difference. Do chart patterns still form? Does price action still do what it's always done? Then how has HFT changed anything important? HFT is just the latest boogeyman to explain away failure.
where have you been? we been talking about problems with HFT in stocks and waay to many market centers\ECN's\dark pools for years.. today it is really hard or even impossible to get into a winning trade on low\medium volume stocks. i'm talking about 100K shares average and above...below-fucking forget it...you won't get anything regardless. on low volume stocks i can pick winners every single day,all day long-no fill.that's issue #1 for me. i keep saying this for years:my fill rates are falling every single day. #2-today it is a lot harder to exit with decent size position. there is no real bids\offers. no real volume. it is a joke,when you trying to sell 1000 shares at bid,where buyer posting 10000 shares to buy and you are able to sell only 100, then bid will move 1-3-5 cents lower,leaving you with partial fill. today i'm losing a lot more money during the exit than 2-3 years ago..subpenny trades..is it good for retail,if one can post bid 0.000000001 cent better than you and get price priority? why they can do this and rest of the public can't? what else do you need? me? i don't need any proof. i see and feel the pain of this HFT business EVERY SINGLE DAY.
So why do you trade that crap? Trade the indices or commodities or trade a larger number of stocks in smaller size or more liquid stocks. Seems to me that if you know what is happening and you keep doing the same thing in response, the problem is with you.