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Originally Posted by Paul T

Read "Flash Boys" by Michael Lewis. Retail investors have been getting screwed by institutions for long, long time....another reason why active trading for the average Joe is a losing proposition.

Yep, it's a good read. Some of the info in it is dated, but latency, is still one of the driving factors. If a trading business does business in the Chicago area and the NY/NJ area, then they'll need data circuits between those two locations. When they shop data circuits, latency of the circuits will usually be one of the primary characteristics that is shopped, and the difference can be a couple/few milliseconds or sometimes less/nanoseconds.

Originally Posted by speeder

The big players are trading using AI algorithms and have been for some time. They can also potentially make as much when the market goes down as when it goes up. They make it coming and going. If you really care, you could educate yourself on this. Or not.

Yes, rather than HFT (high frequency trading - what it was called in the day), these days it's called algo-trading. Most of the time the amount of money made per trade is tiny, but there's a LOT of trading. You can imagine it like the old movie "what happens to the fraction of a cent from each check? What if we could funnel all of those fractions to an account?" The key is that a lot of trades and a lot of money goes through every day and the amount made each time is small.

Algorithmic trading LOVES a volatile market. They don't want a market that's steadily down or steadily up. They want a market that's volatile.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/active-trading/101014/basics-algorithmic-trading-concepts-and-examples.asp