Quote from hii a_ooiioo_a:
It's amazing if as people claim the trading community is small and getting smaller, how much stuff is out there supposedly to support traders. There are so many trading sites for instance, companies that are trying to sell trading advice and tools. Can the number of traders really be as small as it is claimed to be? If there's only a few thousand traders, there's probably a few thousand trading sites; like there would be about one trading site per trader.
There's more people working on the exchanges than the numbers of people allegedly trading for a profession. So there's clearly a lot more making up the markets than "traders".
I would say that there were a lot more of these trading sites and support companies two years ago then there are today. Also since I know 2 people who run sites I know how hard it is to get long-term customers. They claim many of these websites really have very few customers, a lot less then they would seem. Companies like Pristine have had a huge drop off in their number of new people seeking advice. By the way that I see traders dropping over the last year and a lot fewer coming into the business to replace them, I would say numbers are definitely down. Wall Street has slashed a ton of traders in the last year. When Goldman bought spear leeds they took on 500 traders from spear. Now there is only 40 or less of those traders still around.