hey nazz..he didn't say no one can earn here... granted the 2008-2011 vols were nuts...but as a "typical mean reversion trader"(i happen to be one of them) some vol higher than this yr is better. . i'm trying to adapt myself, but if not for my higher capital base it would be very hard to make a living in this ben put scenario. kudos to you that you can excel.
Save your assumed kudos... he ain't excelling, no danger of that. As for volatility being down? sure it is, to the degree of 2005 - 2006. Those years weren't the greatest either, but they were still easier to trade because price action was less v-turn drastic back then. ES total ranges many days in 2006 were 6 to 8 points and that was it, but ER2 (now TF) was rockin' and FX was rockin' and CL was rockin' regardless. Now everything is flat as pancakes much of the time... with scant few true directional moves interspersed. Markets have more prolongued dead spots now than any time in modern electronic trading history. So it takes more patience, more discipline, more trade turns and larger trade size to make less money than before... but there is still money to be made.
austin, my point is that's it's "harder" , that's all. i'm still making ok money , but i agree with iceman that more vol would be better for those of us who are having a harder time being "patient" lol
Yes, I think this is the jist of it...also, real trading volume (not the noise of hft playing ping pong) is a pittance of what it was say 10 years ago. Of course, this would be next to impossible to prove, but it's just an observation (also notice how many ET'ers have left), prop shops closing, etc, etc... In 97-00 or so, you had real retail participation, plus prop traders and the growth of alot of hedge funds...hence there was more predictability to how PEOPLE would react to various price points, chart formations, etc, etc...I can attest to what the OP says about a different rhythm to trading...
In all fairness, the VIX and volatility were decimated at several points during the 2003-07 upswing as well. At one point, we set a record for the longest duration of time for a 2% close lower...much of it, in hindsight, was facillitated by the credit bubble and the tightening of corporate spreads (implying all was hunky dory for 4 years, until it suddenly wasn't). The point is that as the Fed takes over more of the economy and the central planning of said economy, the markets continue to lose their capacity to find an "equilibrium". The only volatility seems to come about as a result of some indecision about what the next balancing act of the Fed will be...what sector they will bailout or implicity support. Politicians and bureaucrats now move markets, corporate earnings are background noise to whatever the central planners decide to do next.
short term traders are in big sh*t as algos destroyed edges permanently. And there is nowhere to hide. Trading longer term is answer but 2012 felt like dead horse kicking. Also you need stellar win rate as length of trends will be mediocre and cant count that good 1 winner will clear all losers and pay you nice %. Also bump up your bet size
give me a break..are you serious? what world you re living? what do you trade? how often?we have 60+ electronic marketplaces (ecn's,dark pools etc). and that's only for stocks... they all shoveling same stocks,that are use to traded on 2 exchanges..even SEC themselves admitted that they don't can can't control current situation on stock market...yes, you are reading this right-SEC said that while ago. maybe a year or so..
i did posted the pic's few years ago,trying to get the attention of the ET crowd..nobody give's a f** about it..now for whatever reason a lot of ET members are gone..ooops.... i posted pictures of intraday charts from past and present for stocks in range that i've been trading for years-100K-500K avg' shares per day. the difference is obvious(at least to me). right now-there is no consistency, just random jumps up or down with periods like 5-30 min without any trade. charts on stocks with trading volume 100-500K shares or more now looks like 10K avg.vol. OTC stock back in 2003-05
I`m very interested. Please post them again if you can. My experience as a day trader is limited to the last years, so I keep wondering how things were in the good old days before the machines took over. I suppose stocks would be the best instrument for comparison. I trade the ES and I know that it is dominated by HFTs, but I`m not sure if looking at ES data from 97 would give a meaningful comparison is it would for stocks. I don`t have that data anyway. Someone once said that price still travels from A to B, it's just that the path travelled has changed. Would that be accurate?
I'd post a EOD chart of S&P500 going back to 1973 if it were more easily straight forward to do so, but anyhow S&P500 price action looks no different then from now. VIX looks slightly different going back to 1990, peaks and troughs are more shaply defined back then, now VIX looks to stall a bit and chop around on peaks and troughs.