What you talking about this market is dead? High frequency traders are donig thousands of trades a day!! Monster volume!!! Never a dull moment in the high frequency trading world!!
No, even HFT guys must be seeing reduced profit in this environment. They depend on volume being high, so volume dropping like this is even worse for them than retail traders because they have to pay very high infrastructure costs.
Feels dead forever. I pay my broker, I pay my tech providers, and then I have enough left over for a few value meals. I'm mostly alarmed by the massive volume drop off in August. If the market stays like that for a while, you're going to see a lot of trader layoffs around Thanksgiving.
I thought the market was closed today for a holiday. It might as well be. Snore. Doing a little YM scalping just to stay awake.
We never had real capitalism. If we did, Tarp would never have happened under Bush, nor subsides for big corn,etc.. Real capitalism means you screw up you lose. Not heads we win, tails taxpayers lose. Privatizing gains and socializing losses does not equal free market.