http://www.businessinsider.com/what-its-like-being-a-trader-out-of-work-2014-6 Low volume, low volatility = no jobs for traditional traders. Plus with everything going electronic, the Street doesn't need that many human traders. Just hire a smart quant to build market-making algos to trade on the electronic exchanges. And the nice thing about software is that you can debug and improve it and know exactly what's going on. With human discretionary traders, it's a crapshoot. The days of discretionary trading is basically numbered or over even at the institutional level. Ending of an era... True, there are still fundamental traders who called fund managers or portfolio managers. But they invest in very long term horizon of months to years. That's the only space left for human discretion. In the short horizon, it's all computers and machines.
We will again see high volatility and high volume when the markets think higher interest rates are imminent.
Some of the guys I know have gone into asset and wealth management. So like what you said, much longer time horizons. Of course it's not exactly easy to get into those jobs. Most of them want CFA's. Nowadays in trading, the triple crown is much more important that actually knowing how to trade. That is, CFA, FRM and CAIA. If you want a career in the trading business, one needs to get these proper qualifications instead of mucking around with "price action".
I read the article, and your commentary about machines replacing discretion ( while certainly true on a micro market structure level) is not what I read in that article. My take was that there is a real aversion to risk.
total bs make plenty of money everyday, enough said check out the spread vol traders they seem to be doing alright.............actually i am glad this shook out out the incompetent rif raff, my biggest problem is deciding which market offers me the best profit versus risk profile, i.e., where to best allocate capital.....but again i paid my dues, and learned how to on a very small scale, once you have money on a big scale...........things become a lot easier if you have the chops
I'm shaking and scared to death. Nothing was moving today. INTC, HPQ YELP, TRLA, WDC, JMEI, ANET, NKTR are just a few which just sat there and did nothing all morning. Absolutely no opportunity anywhere. We're all screwed.
the other thing that came out of all this is the news about the ex goldman prop traders who couldn`t trade once they lost access to real time order flow data from the firm, i suspected this all along, none of these guys can actually trade without access to the firm`s resources, and this officially debunks that Chinese wall crap....come on how hard is it to trade when you know there are a bunch of sell order at the open put in the day before on a soft patch in the markets......i could actually decipher after the fact that this was going on even intraday, as somebody would sell a bunch of crude oil at the close at 1:00pm knowing that an hour and a half later there was going to be a big sell in the equities market - thats not trading that frontrunning How hard is it to sell a bunch of s&p contracts the night before when your firm knows that they have a bunch of sell orders at the open the following day..........not hard at all if your goldman sachs Plus there are about 10 other ways to make money off of firm resource advantages that have nothing to do with actual trading ability.
There will always be greater vola in the future. low vola leads to high vola leads to low vola leads to high vola.
The article linked doesn't warrant the thesis of electronics supplanting human traders. Trading will never, ever, be fully automated because the art of screwing people requires a human touch. ras72 dixit.