I saw the biggest change in ET in 2009 after the fall of 2008...a financial crisis making headlines everyday, congressional hearings, bailouts, corruption et cetera. Mark
Trading is dying. 1) High Frequency Trading 2) Flash crash - lots of margin calls 3) The upcoming transaction tax.
Are we talking about the lack of traders in trading the markets? Or the lack of participants posting in this forum? They are not necessarily linearly proportional to each other. With the reduced traffic in this forum, partially it could be due to online attention competitions: many more websites, many more online forums, chatrooms, Twitters, Facebook, blogs, etc. than a few years back. Even if the number of traders is constant for the past few years, their attention can be spread over many other things.
I think it involves all the above because I saw an influx in users talking about trading during the financial market collapse of 2008 on several different social networks (e.g. twitter, facebook) about the same time as noticing a change in Elitetrader.com and other forums. Mark
Lack of traders in this forum. I still think there are a lot of traders out there. But they are probably less hyperactive as they were before. A lot of the excitement has been taken out of stock trading, there is less speculation and thus less spectacular moves in individual stocks.
1- More websites, 2- More aspiring traders are concentrating on automation (MT4, NT, TradeStation). Some websites/forums concentrate more on this subject. 3- Forex fits better in peoples schedule. You can keep your day job. These guys tend to hang out on forums with a focus on FX. 4- There's too much bashing on this site about the industry which has put off aspiring traders as well as profitable traders.
Libs discovered this site, populated largely by conservatives back then, they came and started trashing every forum... now the whole place is just... well, it's trashy!!