This post The Trading Revolution Can Make You Rich appeared first on Daily Reckoning.
Make no mistake, there’s opportunity everywhere — stocks, bonds, treasuries, options, currencies, Bitcoins — there’s always something to take advantage of in the current market environment.
And you’re about to see how technology is opening up a whole new world of opportunity that has never before been available to you, the individual investor. I’m not talking about investing in new technology, by the way. I mean that new technology is changing the way trading has been conducted for hundreds of years.
And that could be incredible news for you — if you know how to take advantage of it. Let me show you what I mean…
Travel agents, bank tellers, most brick-and-mortar stores, etc, have all been displaced by computers.
But nowhere has the tech-boom been as hard-hitting as on the trading floor of market exchanges. There used to be 15,000 guys down on the floor in the Chicago Board of Trade alone for example, where I spent many years of my life. Now? There’s maybe a thousand on any given day.
For hundreds of years the order route was the same…
You called your broker with a buy or sell, the broker called a desk on the floor, a phone clerk wrote the request on a ticket, a runner “ran” the trade to the trading pit where a broker would execute the trade. An endorsed filled order card was grabbed by another runner and brought back to the desk, a phone call was made to your broker and they in turn called you with your confirmation.
The whole process took just a couple of minutes. Of course, a couple of minutes is dramatically different than the nanoseconds it takes nowadays.
This was intense. Tens of thousands of sweaty, belligerent, almost all alpha males battled daily in a zero sum game. It was an absolute free-for-all, but it was capitalism at its finest. It was America. It was you and the markets and the other guys.
I was there with them, personally elbowing for space in the Treasury Bond pits. That was back in the heyday of the pits, when bonds actually paid substantial interest.
But today, the trading floor of lore, and the “floor trader” is dead.
Because of technology, anybody and everybody can trade in any market anywhere anytime. Money never sleeps. It moves around the globe at lightning fast speed, or the speed of greed if you will.
A man doesn’t stand in the pit to trade anymore, he presses buttons on a laptop. Electrons fly and buy.
Fact is, right now you can click your computer or smartphone and instantaneously buy or sell anything, anywhere around the world, any time day or night. The opportunity now is so much greater than it was when I was a young trader.
The disappearance of the floor means nobody has an advantage anymore.
Big traders and small, short and tall all have equal access to opportunity. (I was disparagingly told I was hired because of my 6 …read more
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