el surdo is absolutely correct in his posts, as are the other professionals who have weighed-in. The equity markets have given amazing profits along with this extraordinary volatility, if you are not profting from this experience simply re-align your trading, and then your thinking, to identify the dominant trend which has millions (if not billions) of dollars behind it, and trade accordingly. This is (relatively) easy to do with your trading, much more difficult to do with your thinking. Good Luck
Certainly not bad days for daytraders. Bad and good periods for them change very often and dont last for too long. It looks more uncertain for longer term and position traders for sure.
I had my best month in 10 years by a factor of 2.5 over my previous best month. everyone I know did extremely well. However, i agree that a declining market will lead to lower volume ,w ealth contraction, and great difficulty making profits. I think thta's the ultimate outcome, so you should make $ while we are really volatile. Intersting that SS ban expires on Yom Kippur. Recall the old saying,m"Buy rosh hashana , sell yom Kippur?" Well, we gapped down huge last Monday at the close, rallied on RH. If we gap up big at the close on Wednesday, I'll be selling the market ahead of Thursday. Go atheists!
I had my best month ever, I guess it's a little different since I trade Cash/Futures. I know friends of mine who had 500K days last week if not more! With 3-4 primary dealers in US treasuries gone in the last 3 months there are no market makers who will fill their void? A Euro bank? - no they are getting blow out! Black Boxes are off and this is awesome trading. The F%CKING spooz had a 80 handle range today two years ago it would move 40 handles over 6 months!
Interesting thread. I dont like this environment. The reason being due to wide ranges, i use less size, and my stops are wider. Furthermore, there are always tape bombs going off, at any time during the day. How you guys get round those problems?