It's not just the HFT industry that has cannibalized itself so much, while spooking regular traders out of the markets, there is hardly any revenue growth left (as the WSJ showed last week). After suffering a substantial drop in bank equity trading revenues over the past several years, there was hope that finally this key P&L items of sales and trading would post a modest pick up.
So much flip-flopping from Dennis Gartman in just the past week, it is enough to make one's head spin.
Over the past 10 years the number of Bloomberg terminal subscriptions have soared nearly 50% as the number of 30-somethng hedge fund managers looking to strike it rich by charging 'yuge' fees to match the returns of the S&P also skyrocketed.
It was just yesterday morning, when futures were tumbling during the year's worst pre-market selloff in the aftermath of Friday's GOP failure to repeal Obamacare, that Bloomberg's Richard Breslow wrote "traders have lost confidence in their ability to interpret what’s plainly market-moving news." He added that "far from hoping to be the first to trade, [traders] need someone else to commit and help create the narrative. No wonder so many funds are shuddering and then shuttering."
Don't play...
The BTFD'ers were back early on, but once the S&P got within a tick of green, shortly after Europe closed, things stalled, only to ramp again in the last hour, pushing S&P into the green, but that was it...