You know what i find interesting about this comment is that if money was so easy at the open you have to wonder how that can be? Every smart trader in the world understands the open has oppurtunity, so with that being the case, how by this point is it not just as hard on the open as any other time period just by the laws of a competitive market??? just asking..
Because openings are chaotic... Which, by definition, means they spike too high or too low... Then revert to mean in a matter of seconds or minutes. This happens too fast for manual trading... You have to be auto-scalping baskets to take advantage of this. We are talking $0.10 or $0.20 cents here... And doing a bunch of auto-scalps for $0.05... You take what you can get these days... it's not so fucking easy. I think a lot of money is lost in the first 5 minutes by retail... To the people that have the infrastructure and experience to take that money.
i totally understand that but there are countless (ok, maybe not countless ) firms taking advantage of statistical anomalys on the open and they have access to a lot of capital and very fast machines.
Inefficiency is at its greatest at the open. Its easy money for experienced traders/scalpers. Easy is a relative term. Still plenty of risk involved but I have the best edge then. Stocks can be mispriced. Like opening print imbalances or fat finger trades. Bids and offers where they shouldnt be.. etc. Computers still cant do everything. Gotta realize that it takes time for a pattern to be programmed, tested and executed. Probably weeks to months. During that time a good trader can take advantage. Then when the algo's start trading the pattern, you move on to another.
Needless to say, I use only Limit Orders. Price improvement on Limit Orders is quite common in the first 10 minutes... (Even $0.05 or $0.10 on my low vol stocks)... And every price improvement is a scalping opportunity... If you can take a $0.05 profit in 20 seconds you take it 100% of the time. At exactly 9:30 my IB blotter lights up with 30-50 trades... Every single one of those trades is a welcome sight. All this only applies to quiet markets opening plus/minus 50 Dow points... Any sort of volatile opening is much more wait and see.