The "game" is now rigged on different levels. But many of the "players" are foolish enough to think they can beat the shitty odds.
Don't these High Frequency systems essentially compete against one another anyway? The seminar was probably filled with the winners. On 60% volume they can't just be feeding off institutions and intuitive day traders.
It's not just a matter of somebody writing some good code and installing a machine on some exchange/ecn. Forget the idiots on speaking seminars. Those don't know much except to be reporting that so & so is raking it in using method x. The big problem is now, you're competing with hedge funds that are market makers and see the order flow, have co-located machines, have huge cash to move a market up & down taking out all sorts of smaller players *and* trade commission-free to boot. It's a bad model and actually worse than the older human model people used to complain about. It's not the fact the sob's use fancy programs to manipulate the market but it's that they're being allowed, even encouraged to do so at different levels. Look at the # of gap & trap opens, the *huge* 15-30 min initial opening ranges & where they begin/end and the mechanics of how it's done and the conclusion is RIGGED market! It's fake volume one way followed by fake volume the other way. This has been going on for the last 2-3 years but it just gets increasingly more noticeable every day.
Im on record here risktaker for years complaining about this bullshit. 1/2 the action is noise, maybe 90% of it is box noise. you notice RIMM crapped itself today after the fake pump last night.
Your brain is smarter than any HFT - why can't you exploit these programs rather than complain about them?
The guy has nothing to complain about, in terms of opportunity, really. All that has happened is that the fast robot traders have taken away all of the low risk opportunities he was enjoying for all this time. The market still provides him with opportunities for profit, but they are just not as low-risk as they were before. The noise he's talking about is just the mob rushing in for the low-risk opportunity. Stock777's complaint is like the fat kid in joining the track team and then demanding everyone else have weights put on their ankles. It makes no sense. Either he needs to change sports (perhaps to sumo wrestling), or lose weight (latency.)
I really need to do some high frequency trading. My goal is to trade 200 times an hour, right now I am only trading 50 times an hour. That's just not enough. It's more like low frequency trading. I need to move to medium frequency trading first and then onto high frequency trading=2000 times an hour. Thanks for the link.
If I want high risk opportunities I can go back to playing horses. I get fresh air and exercise. http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2009/06/19/rise-of-the-market-machines/ I know how to trade against the boxes, I just don't like it. ps, low latency is just a nice way of saying FRONTRUN EVERONE ELSE. It's not smarter , just an unfair advantage SOLD to the highest bidders.
Anyone has a source for the 60% figure? What does this include? If i get filled by a marketmaker/specialist, would that be part of the figure - since they auto-quote too. What about the execution algos to reduce market-impact that most big players use, but that are not HF otherwise. I somehow got the feeling there's a lot in those 60% that doesn't really belong to the hi-freq circle-jerk complaint here. Any insight appreciated.