I have been retail trader with a small account (less than 20k) for several years, I did it in my spare time (ie. after coming home from work), then 2 years ago I started to study the markets deeply and intensively, and have written an automation program which has its own brain (ie. decision making), and a market scanner for it. I finished this development work just some months ago and now I'm applying it. In some other threads I wrote more, also that I'm looking for capital; just use the seearch function here.
LOL look, just pay the fees and get hooked up on the exchange. put ur servers right there as well. then do some HFT and make ridiculous bank then create esoteric options and sell them to banks then sell your program for one billion dollars i can trade 100+ options from 4 different computers, in-person if futures, u name it.... i play games with GS and they spy on me 24/7 how much capital do you need? forget ET, just go print money note: this is PPT's secretary. s/he is way too busy for this
Wrong! They do it especially if you go for larger moves! It depends only on how much profit you are going to make. They calculate how much in absolute numbers your profit would be. Ie. they even won't give you 1% profit because it is $1000 of a $100k position. They try their dirty tricks to force you to close it with less than that, say $700 or so. Average Joe would be scared and would take the $700. Not me! The following can be added to the list: - Never let your order sit too long in the orderbook. I (and my program) do press the order button only if the right time has come, trying to never placing the order into the orderbook, instead buying the Ask (or the Bid when selling). - The Market Maker even knows (ie. stores) about your cancelled orders and their prices, and makes use of this information (of any information he gets about your actions).
The following can be added to the list: - The Market Maker also remembers your stop loss marks (ie. SL percents)! And revisits these marks if it is in his favor! Ie. you better should make your SL/TSL/TGT dynamic... - Watch the spread! The Market Maker is present on both sides of the orderbook, so it is mostly he who sets the Bid and Ask prices, so the spread. But a big spread is a big trap for the buyer b/c the MM will not let the price move beyond the other side of the spread, so you will make a loss when you close your position! If the spread is too big (say >= 4% or so) then you better should not buy! I use this formula when buying: SpreadPct = (Ask - Bid) / Ask * 100.0 Take the 4% with a grain of salt as it depends of course also on the volatility (aka beta) and liquidity (avgvol) of the instrument....
Right now it looks like that the Market Maker of the ticker M has frozen all option prices! None of the about 33 strikes for Dec18'09 and Jan15'10 changes its price, although the underlying is moving.... That's another kind of market manipulation and a dirty trick by the Market Makers...
M is the NYSE ticker of the company MACSYS INC (Industry: Consumer, Cyclical). The stock price moves, but the options of it have stopped moving. It can also be problem at my broker (IB), but since all others I looked at are working fine then it is a little bit mysterious why M has stopped. And: we are talking of about 33 price pairs (33 strikes with Bid and Ask plus BidSize and AskSize)...
The markets are open 24h/day, also on weekends. I know that not much of the people know that. There is the regular trading hours (RTH) and the rest is AfterMarket hours or BeforeMarket hours etc., but practically it is 24h trading.