There is a guy on these boards that does this on a grand scale. His vehicle is options. His machinery is a massive distributed system, a Beowulf. With regard to commish, when you do this type of trading the volume generated gives one significant negotiating power with regard to costs. Imagine your IB schedule reduced by a factor of 2 or more, probably much more. I have no doubt that the future of scalping leads down a path in this general direction.
Not really. He is the king of the 1 word reply. Computerized trading like this, done properly, takes substantially different resources than most here possess. As good as off-the-shelf products are becoming, this is no job for Tradestation and a new P4 single-processor package. There are not only hardware issues, but connectivity, and the proper multi-threaded custom software requirements which all conspire to make it difficult. If you can afford all that then your trading capital is a non-issue, as it takes a fair bit of that too. Oh yeah, then you have to afford lawyers to fight the exchanges as they inevitably get pissed when you take a piece of their pie too easily.
earlier post "All have different style in trading super fast. They place huge fake orders and even push markets in some direction. They trade such huge sizes that they try to mislead everybody. They place huge bids even though they try to sell -- then they takes out the bids and sell the market down etc etc. " not sure if you were just referring to eurex mkts but . . . what do you think happened to those placing 'fake' offers and trying to keep a lid/selling pressure at 38.00-38.25 at approx 11:23am MDT in the ES today when GS, Carr and puking launched over 18k minis to a high print of 41.75 ?!?!
I have to agree. I've never found anything deeper than best bid/ask on the ES to be of any significance that I could use. I don't look at depth anymore; instead I focus solely on charts.
I'm trying to find someone to help me develop an app. for personal use like Tradebolt or any of the others that can automate Tradestation strategies with a third party broker like IB. So far the products available are adequate for position, swing and even longer term intraday trading. However, when it comes to scalping for a tick or two, the apps. that are currently available, including Tradestation just don't cut it. Either the position management is lacking, there is a lag between signal and execution, there is no way of monitoring connection integrity or of managing partial fills and lost orders... Lots of problems for anyone attempting to scalp. If anyone here has programming experience either writing DLLs for tradestation, working with IB's API or would be interested in making stand alone versions of Tradestation strategies to run via some other broker, please PM me. To anyone who is successfully running an automated scalping / market-making system: Congratulations, you are living the smooth equity curve dream.
Yes - would be really interesting to know whether somebody has a fully automatic scalping software running -- i almost think it does not work - I have been searching a lot - but never found something because slippage just takes all profit away.