Despite record-breaking bank earnings reports, it’s a bad time to be a stock trader on Wall Street. It may be hard to believe with the Dow Jones Industrial Average hovering around all-time highs, but declining profits and falling trading volume have dogged stock trading desks for the last five years. As profits and trading volumes continue to disappoint, critics have pointed the finger at computerized trading programs that are rapidly transforming the business into something completely different.

“The art of trading has died,” says Joseph Saluzzi, founding partner of Themis Trading, an independent brokerage firm based in Chatham, New Jersey. “I know tons of traders that have gone out of business.” Saluzzi and other critics argue that computerized trading has created a zero-sum game, in which ever-more complex high speed trading programs vie to buy and sell stocks milliseconds ahead of ordinary investors – and each other – for tiny profits that accumulate over millions of trades.

“It’s the hollowing out of the equity market – it’s been mechanized to an extent,” says Saluzzi. Mechanization has long been blamed for job losses on factory floors and behind checkout counters. Trading desks can now be added to that list. It seems like the once-mighty trader, upon whom so much of Wall Street’s mythology is based, is starting to look like an anachronism.