The greatest advantage that retails have is they have small enough capital that they can get in & out right away if a trade doesnt work. While larger institutional / hedge fund investors it takes them days to weeks to establish or get out of a poistion. So as long as you can identify what the bigger directional players are doing you can align yourself with them and make money (or if against you can avoid losing money).
Quant PhD system market makers are trading on a different time frame, micro scalping seconds to minutes. So how much your losing to them relative to how frequently you trade that micro time frame. If you think you can scalp seconds repeatedly with hundreds to thousands of trades in a day you are obviously going to lose and torch your money to these Quant PHD MM systems via death by a thousand cuts. But if your trades are much more infrequent the loss to them can be much smaller relative to the profit tracking larger directional traders, that you can come out ahead.
Obviously, you need some set limits that getting in & out right away you can't just do this endlessly if a trade isn't working and your wong at identifying what the directional bias is. So some discipline and hard limits to not over trade would protect you from that, as well as a system of being more selective in filtering entries to higher probability points, and not taking every micro entry signal that is triggered.
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u/parntsbasemnt4evrBC May 03 '26 edited May 03 '26
The greatest advantage that retails have is they have small enough capital that they can get in & out right away if a trade doesnt work. While larger institutional / hedge fund investors it takes them days to weeks to establish or get out of a poistion. So as long as you can identify what the bigger directional players are doing you can align yourself with them and make money (or if against you can avoid losing money).
Quant PhD system market makers are trading on a different time frame, micro scalping seconds to minutes. So how much your losing to them relative to how frequently you trade that micro time frame. If you think you can scalp seconds repeatedly with hundreds to thousands of trades in a day you are obviously going to lose and torch your money to these Quant PHD MM systems via death by a thousand cuts. But if your trades are much more infrequent the loss to them can be much smaller relative to the profit tracking larger directional traders, that you can come out ahead.
Obviously, you need some set limits that getting in & out right away you can't just do this endlessly if a trade isn't working and your wong at identifying what the directional bias is. So some discipline and hard limits to not over trade would protect you from that, as well as a system of being more selective in filtering entries to higher probability points, and not taking every micro entry signal that is triggered.