Investors can be forgiven for feeling helpless in a world of high-frequency trading, Flash Crashes and big institutions, who now, more than ever, seem to be pulling all the levers on Wall Street.
"If you're just a regular individual person trying to trade on a daily basis, you're up against an army," says Kathy Boyle, president of Chapin Hill Advisors in New York. "Essentially, these guys have gizmos that you'll never be able to compete against."
The trick, then, may be not to try to beat the institutional investors and all their computerized magic tricks, but rather to join them.
