BOLLOX!!! At the time, Retail Traders where making loads of money via stocks, this put an end to a lot of us profiting
If you were making good profits with less than 25k, your account would've surpassed the threshold quite quickly and PDT would have been irrelevant. Did you realistically expect to make a good living with a sub 25k account? That would imply 300%+ APR every year...
There are several venues like this one for grownups, they do fairly well. Once you get the HFTs involved, there is plenty liquidity and if you have a trading venue, HFTs will come http://intelligentcross.com/ by Imperative Execution does more or less exactly that for institutional traders. It's a dark pool with a single order type, Midpoint Peg (a cross at NBBO mid). The cross occurs within a randomized time interval (to prevent pinging and canaries) and there is some simple ML witchcraft added to address more complex order snooping. In either case, the idea is that once you have an open venue, you attract everyone who is willing to play by it's rules. Invariably, that includes higher frequency players among all others. Even if the setup is such that you can't pick people off, HF players like efficient execution for situations where they have no edge (e.g. hedging or position disposal).
For sure. It would be tough to attract HFTs to sink the investment in to code for your dark pool when you have no volume and are specifically targeting very small transactions like these guys, but maybe the lack of sophistication of their targeted market segment is meant to make up for that. It also sounds like you can't access this dark pool except to have your money deposited with them, not sure if that applies to their MM as well but if so that makes it pretty tough to arb since you're alsways having to wire funds in and out and wait for wire settlement times, which has to be the most archaic part of our financial system.
I was spending it was the issue, about a 12K account bringing in 3K to 4K each month, was making more than enough spending it on a hot blonde I was seeing, had about 2 weeks warning that the change was coming and was like, this has got to be a joke, but no 18hour days, with research and watching market live, wasn't easy!!
You couldn't have kept it up anyway. I still don't understand why people claiming huge consistent returns don't just borrow more -- turn that 3k per month into 30k per month, forget the PDT. I effectively borrowed on good terms when I had the opportunity.
I started from 2K, 6months before and kept it up for 6months, so odds are I could of have kept it up, did very well but Options but spent a lot aswell having fun. No opportunity to borrow, no opportunity to get back in that game, that's just too much money. back then that was a lot of money for me, less so 15years on mind.
If I remember correctly, ustocktrade labels stocks as "limited liquidity" whenever there isn't a buyer or seller lined up for a specific stock. If a stock is labeled as limited liquidity you can't market in or out of a position. I never seriously considered this an option because I couldn't stomach the thought of not being able to close a position with a market order.