Look, from your standpoint you are correct. But try to look at it from the other side. A problem for market makers is always adverse selection and trading against anonymous informed orderflow. In plain English: When someone, who knows more than the market maker hits him with size, the MM is very likely to face a loss and that's what MM's generally try to avoid. So if I was a MM, I would love to provide liquidity for you when you want to buy 100K shares of stock, but I definitely would not short it against you. I'd rather scrape together some longs in front of you and sell it to you at a higher price. Why would I trade against you and risk a blow up? Your definition of liquid markets is a whole bunch of muppets posting static limit orders that you can take at your convenience. And it was that way back in the "glory days"...but how many firms or locals from back then survived and how many of them blew up because they "provided liquidity" against a wise guy who bought 300,000 otm deltas on inside information? Sure, they had a license to steal obscene ammounts of money, because they were closer to the juice but most of them did not survive the final blow. Those days are gone and if you want them back you are free to make a two sided market any day. There were always pickpockets and the whales always were the victims and always will be in the short timeframe. HFT is here to stay, if you are like it or not. So everyone of the "poor" money managers can keep complaining all they want or they can find a way to evade the robots.
I love the folks here that claim they bank, but NEVER provide one concrete example of how. Talk is CHEAP
I can tell you this, whatever you have to do today vs 10-15 years ago to make money, it's a lot more tortuous. Almost like real work, which , if you can get it, is SURE money, and paid vacation. This aint.
I don't think this is necessary. Just get your ass to sit in front of the screen 12H a day and you will find out yourself. Trading has always been a truckton of work. Those who made easy money back in the days and went to the beach two hours after the open did not keep it
No it wasn't always a ton of work. From the 1990s until 2007, there was so much dumb money that it was like stealing candy from a baby. Not so much dumb money anymore, and the ways to trade against the dumb money is made more difficult due to regulations and more sharks competing.
All the HFT programs are computer programs that use conditional statements " If this then that" Your Job is to figure out those conditional statements that these programs use. You do that by watching the movement of the instrument you are trading in relation to the other components of the market! You might not be able to beat HFT programs when it comes to speed but you can out fox them!
Yep. But faceless posers love to claim they have it beat, makes them feel good. My contention is, if you have to work twice as hard to extract a $1 from the market as doing something else, then you're the sucker.
@MarketOwl : Well, thanks to the internet, you can look up threats till 2007 here on ET just for you to see, that people back then ask questions just as stupid as today. It was difficult/impossible for them to make money 10 years ago just as it is difficult/impossible for most people to make money today. So if you made haystacks of cahs ten years ago and find it difficult today, you maybe have difficulties to adapt. If I had to trade with 1990 market structure today, I would not make a dime, whereas it was easy cash for floortraders. Now we have the aera of the geeks, it's easy for them but hard for everybody else. As I said, it's just different. @SoesWasBetter Dude, what do you expect? Do you really think I would hand out a blueprint? And I asume, even if I gave you one, I asume you would not make a dime because you don't understand what I'm doing. Develop your own edge. Everybody had to. If you think I'm posing, so be it. It doesn't make a difference, neither for me nor for you.