don't know, but i am predicting 8-10 yrs of low volatility. Time to hunker down stop buying stuff and eat canned tuna and beans.....or get a real job.
I am constantly analyzing my stock behavior and systems performance and making changes. Last year I started to become more active in dropping/adding stocks off my watch list - even some that had been favorites for almost 2 years got the boot and replacements found when they start trading poorly within the system for which it was built - it is easier to find another stock for an existing system than build new systems for stocks. I found that helped a lot over years previous. Maybe change up exchanges or stock pricing levels as well. Keep changing!
2010 picked up right where 2009 finished. Actually...worse. I am sure plenty of folks are making plenty of money but it seems evident that whatever made me profitable for the first 6 years of my career no longer work.
I had the same problem, made less than 10k in 2009. 2008 was my second year in the business and I made 6 figures. I'm not sure that things have changed that much, but when I ran out of all my money from 2008 and started going into debt I had help from a great friend, and since them I've been on the up and up (with a few minor setbacks). I got setup with an account with very cheap commissions, which has allowed me to explore and develop strategies that would have churned me to death in the past. My advice to scalpers struggling is get yourself on a deal with a a 75-80% payout, and a 20 or 40 cent per thousand ticket. Now I trade high volume, churny, grindy, annoying, and seemingly random moving stocksk with tight ranges, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, and it's very stimulating, lucrative, and the stress is low except when something really gets against me or I pile in on the size. Everyone bitches about HFT this and HFT that, and after slightly over a year of making less than a McDonalds worker, I can safely say I don't care one way or the other about HFT. This month I've sent out over 22 thousand orders to receive 32 thousand fills, all by hand... making about 30-50 cents per order sent out. I'm not flipping for sub milli seconds, but even with a 10-20 second timeframe you aren't competing with HFT guys. My advice to struggling traders is get dirt cheap commissions, dirt dirt cheap, and learn to trade thick, high volume stocks, for small moves, on small size, over and over and over again. If you're burnt out from years of gimmick trading it may be difficult but if you have the burning desire, you will be able to survive these government manipulated dry piece of shit churn algo markets.
$20 on $200k is 10%, and that's not bad for 2009. The past 18 months or so have been "unusual", probably the worst of the computer age. The secret to this business is to stay in business.
you can earn 10k at macdonalds though "If you are out of school you will probably average around 30 hours a week (this could be diffrent depending on your McDonalds). So your pay should be around $10,218.00 a year before any taxes. "
Besides the Russell Rebalance, the summer is always pretty slow. Earnings season is coming up pretty soon, and should, like most earnings seasons, provide some nice trend moves and whippy volatile moves. Of course if the market decides the trend is down, we could be in for some major intraday opportunities maybe similar to 2007...probably not as great as 2008 though....we can only wish for those days.
Quote from BPtrader: Well, let me tell you, you clueless idiots, this is a zero sum game, when you lose money, the money goes into the pocket of other traders. If you have no clue of the concept of "zero sum," you deserve to die, expire, become extinct. Newbies, it is the time to kill these dinasaurs. A new generation of traders will dominate the landscape. He is just parroting what he heard someone else say and thinks it makes him sound smart while trying to put the OP down. Actually, it makes him look even more ignorant. It is clear he does not trade for a living. The stock market is clearly not zero sum. Even commodity markets are not entirely zero sum. I guess he's never heard of hedging as an example???