Quote from tradingmonkey:
Are you people kidding me? I work with TONS of very succesful intraday stock traders who thrive on volatility and the reg nms changes. One thing they don't do is sit around making excuses for why they can't make money trading stocks.
It is not volatility per se that I find to have changed significantly, it is the randomness factor. I totally agree volatility is needed to make money, but clearly there must be order to the volatility, or else it's just playing craps any way you look at it. The randomness has definitely gone way up in the last year, probably due to all the automation and program trades running the world now. Spikes, slop, swift kick in the ass reversals, and huge slippage seem the norm now, and I find that in all size stocks now, small and big. So tradingmonkey- do you really know TONS of very successful intraday stock traders? If so, what techniques are they (and/or YOU) using? Of the several stock daytraders that I've known over the past 5 years, I'm the single only one left who is still trading stocks, but just barely eeking out positive now, and with much bigger risk than ever.