After being driven nearly out of business by a tanking market Canada's largest day-trading firm Swift Trade reversed course and adopted a totally new methodology. Today they employ people who are completely new to the stock market. They each deal in one stock, buying and selling 1,000-share bundles of shares, all day long.

Swift Trade's penny scalping section is only interested in a dozen of the big NASDAQ companies like Cisco and Intel which have a volatile and liquid daytrading market.

Their best proprietary traders know to sell their shares the instant they fall a penny. The traders then buy on the uptick and hold the stock until the price drops again.

Charles Kim, founder of Swift Trade: "It sounds obvious, but it seems to run against human nature. Selling a stock when it starts to fall requires more discipline than you might imagine."

Most traders place buy and sell orders every few seconds to pocket gains as little as 5¢. With this penny wise scalping Swift Trade can accumulate significant profits, e.g. US$ 50000 a day collected by 50 traders. But most of their recruited personal is not able to master the hard reality of the market. About 80% of all trainees fail to make gains scalping the markets for pennies.

Downstairs at Swift Trade is the old type of proprietary day trading section. Traders working here only make a fraction of their colleagues upstairs. It seems that the markets have changed and that it's hard to adapt once learned trading techniques and acquired behaviors in a changing environment.