What does it have to do with Obama? Weird. So you're saying the rising volume under Bush was thanks to him? Then the huge volume in the drop of 2008 was his as well. In any case. leave politics out of this, it only makes you look very unsophisticated. Volume is down because retail investors have not yet joined in, and are either in bonds, gold or emerging. You cannot call market tops until they join the party.
does this take into account all the off exchange and dark pool transactions? I for one stopped running an equity trade because my volume went down more than 90% which I attribute to dark pools and low volatility
This is all very silly. There is plenty of volume for daytraders, especially in futures. Just find your market, oil works great these days and there will ALWAYS be volume in currencies. Traders always need to find excuses for under-performance.
On May 9th you will wake up with the Boogie man in bed with you...you will be busy crapping in your pants you will not trade. So there goes the volume . LOL Too many paranoid and scared people on this board, how do you all make any money????????
Interesting chart, thanks. I'm sure that the answer has little, if anything, to do with either of the two US presidential administrations. Volume went up dramatically during the 2000-2008 period, far more than [pick your favorite macroecon stat]. My take: Volume went up dramatically as exchanges and trading used technology to make trading much cheaper on a per-share basis -- both automated and manual traders jumped into the market and were profitable due to the "looseness" of the market at the time. From about 2007 till now, competition due to these new entrants building and refining their methods dramatically increased, and continues to increase. This is compounded by the fact that a lot of simple ideas can be computerized, and computerized traders compete against eachother for ever-decreasing margins. A second effect of this is that you now see a massive dropoff in profit at a lot of the high-volume traders that publicly report income (e.g., Timber Hill unit of Interactive Brokers), as well as computerized traders shutting down: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=218733