I wanna make it as a retail day trader

interesting article

thank

Invest in weed stocks, m-a-nnnn.

Thats the future.

Just invest in a risk parity fund and don’t look at it for ten years.

Survivorship bias is the reason it seems like people make money day trading, but they don’t, I don’t, and you won’t.

johndoll wrote:

I tried to do trading. At first I worked on a demo account and I made progress in this matter, but then after switching to the main account, I began to lose my money. It’s strange because I didn’t change my strategy ... In the end, I decided to forget about trading and I did not regret it.

^This. Other posters have said it's about making more winning trades than losing trades. That's not accurate. It's more about being able to keep your losses to a minimum.

It is incredibly stressful when you have real money on the line. I occasionally make swing trades. I stress more over them than the rest of my portfolio, which is considerably larger. It is almost impossible for the average person to remain objective and true to a strategy when you have real money on the line. Worse, it's almost impossible to find a working strategy. Even the best strategies only work part of the time.

One of the biggest problems with day trading today is that you only hear from the winners who are bragging how they turned $500 into $2,000. For every winner, there are about 20 losers. You don't see those posts because people aren't so eager to brag about losing money.

Overwhelmingly, most people would be better off with a portfolio of 6-8 ETFs.

I doubt your honesty. I do not believe any retail traders, swing trader as you call yourself makes enough money to survive. Retail traders are trying to trade like hedge fund managers. Hedge funds have a stream of revenue coming in from commissions from their clients. The larger a hedge fund manager, the more apt a hedge fund manager is to meet multi-millionaires and billionaires thus gaining access to insider knowledge. Eg. if you work at Big Pharma and you are illegally trading on your insider knowledge, do not get caught. If that is not the case, I do not believe you. For a small timer to beat market(s), value investing or value trading. Value trading is trading about once every three to six months when serious anomalies have been spotted.

I do not think you should do this, OP.

The price of a stock reflects (more or less) the sum total of publicly available information about its worth. In a world where day trading was a viable career for people like you, you'd have to know something -- many somethings, actually -- that, in general, everyone else doesn't. There are a few different ways that you could do this:

* You could be exceptionally brilliant at noticing things other people don't. Are you exceptionally brilliant, OP? like, a Robert Mercer/John Paulson-type genius?

*You could have insider information that you're trading on -- which the SEC does not take kindly to :)

* You could do very specialized research into a class of asset -- think using satellite data to track shipping patterns in a way that no one else has thought of, including the many specialized & VC-funded firms that have cropped up to do this kind of work -- or a class of information (e.g. governance structures) that other people have previously neglected;

* You could have so much money and time to spend that your investment itself is a major signal to the market, or it buys you a seat at the table (i.e. you'd become an activist investor).

If none of these conditions holds, I think you're very unlikely to outperform an index tied to the S&P.

I share your dream of never going into an office again, OP; but this plan is just a fantasy. I think you can presume that people who tell you otherwise are trying to sell you something.

Wait for 2nd Corona wave, election uncertainty to subside and when things are looking like going back to normal buy into FANG tech portfolio that includes AAPL, AMZN, GOOG and you'll be up 60%+ in 2 months which is what you'd have had you bought back in March

Well I don't know what to tell you. You are 100% wrong. Check out podcast Chat With Traders, go pickup and read the book Market Wizzards by Jack Schwager. Tons of examples of people that trade for a living.

Internetsherlock wrote:

Does anyone here understand that OP and me are referring to prop trading firms ? Or do you guys not know what it means ? we are not going to be trading with Our money!!

I won't be surprised . So much for Finance degrees hah

Nobody will hire either of you. You have to a very long record of making money.

MarketWizards isn’t guys with their own money.....

If you can beat the S&P by 1% on $10bn and collect fees and upside, then you can quit your job and day trade. These guys don’t day trade stocks either fwiw

If you are trying to beat the S&P by 1% on $1mm capital, even leveraged, keep your day job and don’t waste your time.

How do you make trades these days with HFT and algo traders? It all seems to come down to latency. I guess if you can pick a strategy and stick with it maybe? Like only be a trader that trades on news?

ssddsdsd wrote:

How do you make trades these days with HFT and algo traders? It all seems to come down to latency. I guess if you can pick a strategy and stick with it maybe? Like only be a trader that trades on news?

All the idiots w/o jobs thinking they can trade will disappear once the volatility moves out. Anyone could have made money last 3 months. You just had to buy something because everything went up. It was nearly impossible to 'day trade' last several years because everyone moved to index investing. Just take a look at how bad hedge funds were doing during that time. They couldn't even beat the market. All the crazy trades they concocted could not beat simply holding the position.

BoA wrote:

ssddsdsd wrote:

How do you make trades these days with HFT and algo traders? It all seems to come down to latency. I guess if you can pick a strategy and stick with it maybe? Like only be a trader that trades on news?

All the idiots w/o jobs thinking they can trade will disappear once the volatility moves out. Anyone could have made money last 3 months. You just had to buy something because everything went up. It was nearly impossible to 'day trade' last several years because everyone moved to index investing. Just take a look at how bad hedge funds were doing during that time. They couldn't even beat the market. All the crazy trades they concocted could not beat simply holding the position.

Indices have nothing to do with day traders or value investors luck &/or skill in beating market(s). Indices do not prevent member of U.S. Congress from beating markets. Ever notice that members of Congress often get rich trading equities, none go bankrupt. That said, stay away from Day Trading. Day Traders are going against professionals at N.Y.S.E., N.A.S.D.A.Q. professional market makers, professional traders at regional equity exchanges. Day Traders are trading on publicly available info. Think of all the people in Congress and employees at publicly traded corporations who have inside knowledge. Congress & corporate insiders are not supposed to trade on inside info. Very few ever get arrested for insider trading.

4 Years now wrote:

I've been swing trading for about 4 years now. My trades take anywhere from 4-48hrs to play out usually.

Ignore all other replies and read this a few times.

randomcoach wrote:

Ignore all other replies and read this a few times.

To clarify, I was referring to the entire post.

Thread is brutal.

Retail have no strategic edge and even they did it’d be swallowed up by the bid/offer spread and/or brokerage.

Listen to this guy.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCczw6L9MSllTvWDK1fNlLrg/videos

I day traded a bit while at had more time at home during the shutdown and after a few losses I ended up coming out on top. At first i was listening to warrior trading advice and going for gappers right as the market opened.That did not work out well. Then I eased back a little and normally didn't start my positions until about 10:30. I picked solid companies(not penny stocks or bio tech $hit) that were down with low RSIs that I knew would climb thier way back by the end of the day. Also I tried to pick companies that would be fine in the long run so if I made a mistake, I wouldn't mind holding for a longer period. Now that I'm back at my normal schedule I am just holding medium to long on my positions.