agreed. also, from a programming point of view it's a lot easier having a strategy run 1 lots becuase you dont have to deal with partial fills.
what was the trading world like before 1997? For futures you had many middle men. Best scenario if you went through a brokerage firm. Trader -> phone clerk -> arb clerk -> filling broker -> pit trader but more than likely there were about 2x to 3x that many middlemen if you were a small fry. Machines have just gotten rid of the fluff. Anything that is mindless can be automated and that goes for every industry.
Why? A big part of the Black Art is disguising your size by using lots of small trades through multiple avenues.
I am but a simple country boy. Are you telling me that an algo needs to disguise the fact that it traded, say, at a bounce off of yesterday's low? Or at the end of the retrace to a breakout? Or at any number of other setups in the TA cookbook?
I do not think that machine gonna dominate the market. The main strength of the computers is their main weakness: They´re mechanical. Human eye and mind had evolved trough a lot of time to adapt to dangerous environments trough recognizing patterns that lead to a possible danger. And machines are pretty limited in their patterns, even a random number generator has a pattern that can be recognized if you afford the energy and the time to it. If the market become 100% automatic, there will be no chaos in there, the number of patterns would be limited to the number of minds that program the computers. Another thing, machines can defeat us only in an environment with known conditions and a limited number of possible variables (like chess). The market is one of the most unlimited environments, if you have the mind and the power (financial), you will win out there.
I think it is just a matter of time that machine would replace 99% people in trading eventually. It's the big trend, just like the trend in the market which is unstoppable.