How much more difficult is trading today versus 100 years ago?

Let's put it this way...you'd probably do much better IF you had today's technology to trade markets from 100 years ago. But back then, there were no computers or even hand-held calculators. Everything was by hand, and about all you had were a few things like Dow Theory...which was available to everyone else too (kind of like charts, simple backtesting, etc. is available to everyone now). So trading relative to trading technology available has never been easy...unless you have a time machine.
 
Must be still not easy cause they didn't have personal computers and TA knowledge (bty, Japanese candle stick is more than 100 years old). Seeing the following comment from Mark Twain (died in 1910), I believe trading wasn't still easy 100 years ago.

"October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February."
 
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heispark said:
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"October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February."
More...

Good one. That gave me a chuckle.
 
More difficult? Trading is much easier today vs 100 years ago. There are many more markets including round the clock futures, FX etc. Costs and fees are a miniscule fraction of what they were then. Liquidity is orders of magnitude greater. Technology means you can move millions of dollars via your Ipad while taking a crap at home, instead of hand signals in the pit, or sending orders by telegraph to get scalped by floor brokers.

The trading community would be about 1% the size it is now with markets from a century ago.
 
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