Hey mate. My personal experience is quite limited having only...

Hey mate. My personal experience is quite limited having only been in markets for some 6-7 years, with active trading only consisting of the last 2 years or so (and really the last one year of being profitable month to month).

In my opinion yes computers brought new efficiencies and strategies to the table which capitalize on human emotions which haven't changed. I think they just exacerbate emotion and we see these more volatile moves as a result. Cheaper brokerage and ease of entry have introduced more liquidity to the markets, and the turn around on participants is higher.

These days the real money is made in massive spreads of inefficiency and using high speed trading. Though now the barrier to entry for HFT has come down and the big players are saying their profits are way down compared to where they were a few years back. Technology tends to give and take back its edge before something new is figured out. AI will be interesting in that regard, where I think those with the most advanced and well trained models will have the edge. But then that technology will quickly work its way into the hands of retail traders and who knows what will happen. I've been using it as a means to create tools to complement my discretionary trading, and I'm seeing more and more uses for it as a research assistant. A personalized AI model would be something I'd be very interested in for trading and decision making.

Certain strategies have been arbitraged away over time and replaced with highly complex ones, especially in the more exotic asset classes which are beyond me for now. We still see the same types of behavior in themes however.





The concept I trade is a belief that compression precedes expansion. In a good market it works very well and right now I am having a good couple of months. So far this idea which had been used by many successful traders over the years continues to work but you need to ingest it and make it work in your own manner. The human component of trading is something that typically comes last in ones development where mastery of the self becomes the goal. The strategies are all out there for anyone to study but making yourself a robot (so to speak) with discipline is very much against our nature - which is why, in my view, we have the huge failure rate of traders.

Drawing in new traders to replace the old is the game of 'wall street' and all its affiliates (Motley Fool for example). It's like a casino and if you study how they manage risk and keep people coming in through the doors you'll understand the whole thing a lot more.