Quote from Hydroblunt:
So at least recognize that your "success" is mostly just being a privielege of being at the right place at the right time. I definitely gotta give props to whoever found Millenium
then you can give your props to me. (you and everyone else at swift who takes what their branch manager shows them for granted...)
I quit trading 4 weeks before I discovered the goods. Our firm only had the connection a couple weeks at the time. I came back to trading for a second chance and this time I wasn't going to be lazy/complacent/a chump. I was working my butt off to try and find something that worked consistiently. I had been trading for 8 months at the time (attempting to arb ecn's on QQQ vs. the amex specialist...)
It was a bit of a fluke how I discovered it. I think I put out a limit bid 1 cent below on LU. and it got filled!! not sure how that happened, because it hasn't happened since. That was sometime in October 2004. I decided to check out the nyfix web page and see what stocks were most active on their system the day before. SCH seemed to be there quite frequently. I traded SCH almost every day for a week or 2. Sit on the nyse bid, get filled, punch out at the ask. If there wasn't an order on SCH I'd search through the 200 most active stocks of the day one by one looking for a miln order. I did that for a few months before I thought there must be some way to do this faster. Then I thought why not use a macro? At that point I made 4 lists of 100 stocks sorted by average volume and recorded my keystrokes. Within a week or two, 2 or 3 others who were now trading the same way as me were given a macro program so they could record their keystrokes also. I felt kind of betrayed at the time. Probably mostly due to the fact that it was the exact same macro program, they didn't even have to do the work of going out to find one themselves and saying, 'hey can I install this on my computer?' Oh well, I got over that a long long time ago now...
Ah the good ole days... Anyways, it's a completely different game now. The instuitions actually got smart about how they enter their orders. No more market buy 100,000 AG... It's all split up into small lots, timed randomly, buying below VWAP etc... tricky to make money on, that's for sure.
I completely recognize that my success is partly due to being at the right place at the right time. But it took 9 months before that of making nothing trading. And a ton of hard work. Things are always changing and I need to constantly adapt to stay a step ahead of the masses... Anyone who knows me will tell you that I've done a pretty good job of that.
cheers!
mnx