That certainly gives me food for thought.

The whole purpose of the new platform is to speed up development and provide greater flexibility. Even then, development is a slow tedious process that takes many man-hours and lots of $$$. So we have to be careful about the development choices we make.

The first issue is: what time frame is most likely to deliver the most benefit. Long or short? Discussion of what time frames are the most profitable to trade warrants a separate thread, but I will attempt to kick off the discussion here.

I believe that the market is dominated by the big money investment houses and super funds who generally take a long-term view of the market. HFT generates large volume but little direction as they are simply trying to 'front-run' the big money. Retail investors are dominated by long-term SMSF investors as well, while traders are a small slice of the pie.

Now the big money may describe their view as long-term, but this would generally be 2 to 3 years as they have to account to investors for performance. I would call this medium-term to distinguish them from the truly long-term SMSF investors who buy Telstra and the banks (for example) and seldom if ever sell them.

If we are to make money we either have to feed off the big money herd, like wolves following the reindeer migration, buying and selling in shorter time frames, or else play the long game, buying stocks with a 5 to 10 year time horizon.

I prefer the long game, but that may be more a matter of temperament than any kind of statistical evidence. However, there seems to be far more wealthy long-term investors than short-term traders.

I hope other readers will weigh in with their views.