I'm pretty new... I know nothing about these other ECNS. I can trade with MMs, arca, isld, SIZE, brut, btrd, and trac in my box. Could somebody please give a brief explanation of how people use these other ECNS? Hitting/taking in the money...? That sure would be nice...
Ok, I thought you were talking about the present. First of all, it's not an ECN, it's an ATS Unlike an ECN, Nyfix doesn't post quotes. If it were an arb, you'd indeed be right that it would be just a privilege of having been at the right time, at the right place. However, by claiming that it's an arb, you show that you don't have a clue what's going on. It's WAY more complicated and it requires a lot of knowledge, skills, huge balls and taking huge risks... Again, like said before, trading NYFIX is absolutely NOT free money. If you think it is, why don't you start trading it this monday There are a lot of prop firms out there with access, so that can't be an excuse anymore However, there is SOME truth in having been at the righ time and right place: While it has never been an 'arb', it used to be a lot 'easier' to make money on NYFIX and it will only get more and more difficult ...
then you can give your props to me. (you and everyone else at swift who takes what their branch manager shows them for granted...) I quit trading 4 weeks before I discovered the goods. Our firm only had the connection a couple weeks at the time. I came back to trading for a second chance and this time I wasn't going to be lazy/complacent/a chump. I was working my butt off to try and find something that worked consistiently. I had been trading for 8 months at the time (attempting to arb ecn's on QQQ vs. the amex specialist...) It was a bit of a fluke how I discovered it. I think I put out a limit bid 1 cent below on LU. and it got filled!! not sure how that happened, because it hasn't happened since. That was sometime in October 2004. I decided to check out the nyfix web page and see what stocks were most active on their system the day before. SCH seemed to be there quite frequently. I traded SCH almost every day for a week or 2. Sit on the nyse bid, get filled, punch out at the ask. If there wasn't an order on SCH I'd search through the 200 most active stocks of the day one by one looking for a miln order. I did that for a few months before I thought there must be some way to do this faster. Then I thought why not use a macro? At that point I made 4 lists of 100 stocks sorted by average volume and recorded my keystrokes. Within a week or two, 2 or 3 others who were now trading the same way as me were given a macro program so they could record their keystrokes also. I felt kind of betrayed at the time. Probably mostly due to the fact that it was the exact same macro program, they didn't even have to do the work of going out to find one themselves and saying, 'hey can I install this on my computer?' Oh well, I got over that a long long time ago now... Ah the good ole days... Anyways, it's a completely different game now. The instuitions actually got smart about how they enter their orders. No more market buy 100,000 AG... It's all split up into small lots, timed randomly, buying below VWAP etc... tricky to make money on, that's for sure. I completely recognize that my success is partly due to being at the right place at the right time. But it took 9 months before that of making nothing trading. And a ton of hard work. Things are always changing and I need to constantly adapt to stay a step ahead of the masses... Anyone who knows me will tell you that I've done a pretty good job of that. cheers! mnx
mnx, I would guess you are personally responsible for 40-60% of swift trade revenue, its just unbeleivable. You truly due exemplify extreme work ethic and incredible love for trading. Your strategies may not/never be true/pure price prediction, but your creativity and drive have really changed your life and many other peoples lives, including mine. Keep it up.
Mnx, I'm curious about something: Let's say you had taken a completely different approach to sharing your research & methods. If instead of sharing freely, you had chosen to carefully guard your secrets, only helping 1 or 2 very close friends while shutting out everyone else... Had you done this, would your pockets be fatter today?