Advantages and Disadvantages of Being a Day Trader

I think most people get into day trading cause lack of funds and dreams of grandeur, I have poured half of my life into learning how to day trade and it still ongoing but very much less time now. I started in stocks and learned by hand, they much easier to eventually to learn that less is better and trade off weeklies, use option to hedge and only now doing more credit spreads and learning how to use debit spreads for short term counter-trend moves so I don't have to get out of original position. Using dividend stocks even better.

I never thought suicide even at lowest areas of day trading learning, but I knew what or why I was losing, laziness plain and simple- just didn't want to learn to program. I found programing much tougher than learning patterns, but you can't test money management rules by just looking at 300 sample size. Day trading truly is what you put into you will reap, but the biggest problem is discovering what doesn't work for you. There many struggles in learning how to pull money out of your computer, if it was easy, ....

But what is truly funny is in day trading, less time doing it is better for me, I think back of 18-20 hours of day trading currencies, Indexes, overseas, what a waste. Get real good at 1-2 signals, build up your account slowly in beginning, every 2 months add shares or lots, get consistent make anything each day, really learn what you do by studying why something makes some move, do it yourself, don't buy into chat rooms or systems, just 1-2 signals. S/R and a trend trade which is either retracement back to moving ave or fibs, That's it and then back test to fill in the rest. And the hardest part is not changing anything during the session.

But 75% of what I have accumulated has been long term stocks/commodities. If you can't sleep at night, learn to hedge.
 
To me I like to be in and out during the day.. I remember I used to have an overnight gap strategy where I would usually make 10-40 percent with paper money. I soon found out it was just about impossible with real money, I remember having one of the worst nights of my life being in a large short position as a beginning trader and even though deep down I probably knew it was going down in the morning.. the fear of holding it was terrifying, logging into my account and being down near 1000 dollars on a 5k account. Luckily, I waited it out in the morning and made 200 dollars, never again. Also, bad news can hit a reputable company and you'll wake up down 20%, it's just not worth it to me
 
pk3r1234 said:
To me I like to be in and out during the day.. I remember I used to have an overnight gap strategy where I would usually make 10-40 percent with paper money. I soon found out it was just about impossible with real money, I remember having one of the worst nights of my life being in a large short position as a beginning trader and even though deep down I probably knew it was going down in the morning.. the fear of holding it was terrifying, logging into my account and being down near 1000 dollars on a 5k account. Luckily, I waited it out in the morning and made 200 dollars, never again. Also, bad news can hit a reputable company and you'll wake up down 20%, it's just not worth it to me
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Successful people place their life savings in the stock/bond market, and you can't hold a swing overnight?

You got much, MUCH to learn.
 
Risk = 99% Knowledge, whether you day trading, swing, long term, options, mutual funds, stamps, coins, real estate, businesses, if you know more about what you doing than others and have a process and system, you will have huge edge over others.
 
Very informative reading about who makes money of wall street.

The author without even realizing it felt into his own trap. He failed to make $, so he assumed that apart from few well known methods that he listed no one else can rack up consistent profits.

There are tons of other ways to be successful. For example a friend of mine is invested in http://www.ljmpartners.com/. They are option sellers that have been in business for over a dozen of years managing around 350 mil. No too shabby.

My main issue with day trading is amount of screen staring time that is required and scalability that leads to somewhat small size. I personally went the way of automation.

Surf,
Btw, my brain was acting in a different way. The more I lost the more pushups and sit ups I was doing J. I was actually getting fitter the more I lost. Occasional huge up days were followed by cognac.

Regards,
redduke
 
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Autodidact said:
Successful people place their life savings in the stock/bond market, and you can't hold a swing overnight?

You got much, MUCH to learn.
More...

Not worth it to me. I don't trust the stock market, I can make plenty of money during the day and get a good night sleep while starting fresh in the morning. Like I said, even reputable companies like apple tanked hard during that overnight crash. Successful people who have their life savings in the stock market don't trade for a living.
 
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