I agree with you about it not being HFT... however everything else you said is complete bs Maybe you should try banging keys if it's that easy... or better yet hire some monkeys to do it for you... idiot!
not to be mean, but you are NOT a HFT. if you insist on calling yourself one then you are not the kind that people hate. real HFT are thieves, pure and simple. they literally steal money everyday through a two tiered system.
I did while the risk/return was where I wanted it to be. It was/is profitable but as all good things, became saturated. As I said, there are times where it can take some finesse but its generally a low risk/high volume trade. Of course it helps to understand your routes and be efficient but there is not much to learn. Thanks for calling me an idiot though, troll is a troll.
It was possible to hit that easily in the golden days. It was a game where you could essentially trade as much as you could afford. There was so much volume trading on NYSE that the only thing holding you back was the amount of money in your account. Place 10, 10k orders for Citi on 1 side of a single level was peanuts.