Hello, I have been trading manual for about 3 years now. Its not dead at all. I am not as sucessful as I want to be, but that is my own fault. I believe if you have a well back tested strategy, you can trade manual. Besides who has the money for automation trading. I prefer manual systematic trading.
Algofy, And that is exactly what I am doing. Teaching myself to code what I believe will make me money trading futures. This way i can backtest a strategy then trade it manually or automation wise if I choose knowing the chances of it working.
Or, they trade on the side and their work schedule won't permit them to day trade. Or, a person's preferences may not be to day trade. In my own case, I was knocking it out of the park day trading but I hated the amount of time that I had to devote to it and figured that holding for a few days is a better method for me.
Discretionary vs auto trading is an opportunity cost, ideal scenario is some one doing a bit of both.
No, but it's like everything in life, it trends. Currently that trend is tech and micro, the alternate is discretionary and macro. Given that tech always leaves an exposure point, you just need to identify that and exploit when it comes online. Unfortunately you also need a level of perfection to find that exploitation point few have the skills or tech for, hence why the floor traders became non-existent. Basically you can use tech plus discretionary to trade against tech, the mind is many times more powerful at contextual analysis than a computer, so you use the opposite method, slow and sure instead of fast and furious. It's gone underground, because the reward from discretionary these days is not something you want to float around too often, people become very upset.
I learned programming basics through an online course and Ebooks then just applied it to the program that I traded with.