Thanks for the response. This is exactly why I tell everyone who thinks they should dabble in trading to stop it. The regular person who thinks they can beat the stock market for alpha has huge odds stacked against them.
Real professionals that work at true proprietary trading firms:
Are not paying stupid amounts of money on retail commission.
Have direct access to exchanges via having a seat at the exchange, no middle broker.
Are using true HFT (not just automated trading ) with collocated servers at these exchanges.
Market making for tiny tiny spreads - it's how most trading outfits make their money, not on positional trades, (real data is hard to come by but anecdotal evidence is abundant on this)
Since you are the expert, is my assessment mostly accurate?
I think you are correct about what prop trading firms do, but I am not so pessimistic about the prognosis for retail investors. I don't think retail investors can compete with professional prop traders at what they do, but I think that they can do better than just sticking their money in index funds, at least on a risk adjusted basis.
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