The Globe and Mail

The meteoric rise of stocks so far this year has summoned the decade-old spirit of a past rally: the day trader.

A 57 per cent gain in the S&P 500 Index since March has made it more tempting to flip equities from the home computer. But it was the big rout that preceded this rally that sparked the interest, said Ben Bittrolff, 30, a seasoned day trader who says he is up 373 per cent on the year.

"All the way down, advisers were telling people to hang on. These guys told them, 'Don't worry, it will come back,' " he said. "Then people said, "Why am I paying an adviser 2 per cent and he's got me in RIM and I'm losing money? I can just do that myself.' And that's how they start migrating to day trading."

But this time is different, said Mr. Bittrolff, who stayed at the table long after the tech stock collapse of 2000 and the crash after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States. He now helps to run a company that sells trading software to day traders, and has noticed a rising interest in the products.

"Day trading has evolved. It's a technological arms race, and computers play a far more dominant role in day trading now," said Mr. Bittrolff, who is chief financial officer of Cyborg Trading Systems Inc. in London, Ont.

But the game has changed in the nine years since The Globe and Mail last profiled him in 2000, when at the tender age of 21 he was trading stocks all day and said that he was completing his full-time economics and finance degree "on the side" at Wilfrid Laurier University.

This world is not for the casual guy who thinks he can beat Wall Street, because he can't. — Ben Bittrolff, CFO of Cyborg Trading Systems

Once he graduated in 2002, he and his winnings headed to Swift Trade Inc. to work as a day trader. Then he moved on to a derivatives trading desk at Refco Inc. Upon the firm's collapse amid an accounting scandal, Mr. Bittrolff enrolled in an MBA at Laurier, then managed a trading floor at CFT Financial until February of 2008, when he recognized an even better way to make money from the day-trading business.

The recent rise in day trading has created demand for software that serves high-frequency independent traders. Mr. Bittrolff's product, which launched in September, is similar to that of big firms that use "black box" investing principles - a computer-based model that analyzes data feeds and executes trades automatically. However, it allows the user to customize the data using Dow Jones feeds as well as manage objectives and trading actions through partnerships with specialized high-speed trading platforms.