What they said. You can day trade with $3k but it would be severely limiting and limited. But you can do this. Scrape up another $1k. Fund TWO $2k accounts with different brokers. Now you got 6 day trades per sliding 5 day period. Just call it 6 day trades per week but it's actually in any rolling 5 trading day period.
I have never traded with a cash account but it looks like a bit of a PITA and you lose some flexibility. Still it is a viable option, yeah.
Another thing you can do is "night trade". That's what I call it. Do your scans in the late afternoon. Open positions in the last 15 minutes of regular trading hours. If your broker gives you post-market trading privileges, even better but still try to buy in (assuming long positions in bull market) by 1600 NY time. Picking stocks is a lot different from day trading the morning session. I suggest you open a paper account and trad. e ONLY overnight for a couple months, and get used to the market, before you do this on a regular basis. Okay so anyway then wake up early early, like a half hour before your broker allows you to trade. Now you can sell anything you got with no daytrade counter advance. If a stock has been taking off in the morning and nosediving at lunchtime for the last few days, look for it to behave the same way. And so on. Sell when you think it has reversed. Or just hold on to it. Whatevah. IN A STRONG BULL MARKET, you can do pretty good buying at the last minute and holding overnight. TBH you can do pretty good in a strong bull market doing just about anything reasonable besides randomly picking short positions, but that's another discussion. This style of trading pretty much doubles your fun and profits.
Now back to day trading and your 6 daytrades. Yeah, assuming you have two accounts. You can do like two daytrading days, or just one if your trading style is more in a scalping nature. And you still have some action with your overnight holds. It is a good idea to always have one day trade in reserve, though, in each account, so at the last minute you can bail out of a trade that is going against you.
I believe a newbie with a small account really needs to keep it small and tight when it comes to risk and position size. Once you have a few months experience and have started making profit, I sort of lean away from the pack. I think if you have a small account and you want to grow it in a meaningful way, and not be working for a nickel an hour, and if it is money you can afford to lose, an increase in risk can be a sensible plan. If it's just money and you can make more, then as long as your risks are commensurate with your profits, why not bet out big? BUT... it needs to be funded by more or less expendable funds, and traded by a trader with a proven track record and reasonable continued expectation of profit, in market conditions that the trader well understands and is familiar with. Just a couple grand, hey you can mow yards and powerwash houses and make that back. Now if you were just a couple thou from trading up to the magic $25k mark, of course you need to get more conservative, not more aggressive. Set your risk level accourding to your situation, not the rule book. A raw beginner should be trading crazy small positions. That in effect reduces your tuition, so to speak, and allows you to stay in "school" longer. Paper trading IS NECESSARY but it only teaches you just so much. Real market conditions teach real market trading. And the way to jump into real markets is with real small positions. If you are past this stage, and you can afford to lose all or most of your account and be back at the table in a week or two, but you want to trade up and not fund up from your humble beginnings, think about where your risk limits need to be instead of just accepting the conventional wisdom. You can make $10 a day on your $3k account. You can make $150 in a good day on your $3k account. Obviously you have to assume a lot more risk to do the latter but you can be a real stick in the mud and make the former. And the risk required to make $150 can easily have you losing $50 or even $100 in a day. And it is twice as hard to make it back as it was to make it in the first place.
I started trading last year with only $10k. Later I funded up to $50k but I am very familiar with the PDT and how it affects your trading. I stopped trading in October and started again a couple months ago with an underfunded account again and no practical means of funding back up to that level right now, so the plan is to trade up instead of fund up. It can be done though it isn't easy. Current market conditions are very conducive to trading up, if you don't mind a little extra risk in return for extra profit. It will be the same when the next crash comes, though of course it will be bearish rather than bullish action. Sluggish sideways markets are a whole nother critter. I'm doing okay, though still working at the trading for chimp change if you look at it on an hourly basis. I've made $97 today and of course it all stays in the account. I can't pay myself anything. But every $100 day is another $100 closer and worse comes to worse, when I am close I CAN go ahead and fund up out of checking. So progress is being made, slowly. Make 1% CONSISTENTLY and you double your account in 70 days. It is tough to do that. You really have to be playing a hard game and managing your money intelligently, and picking your entries and exits, especially entries, with great care and thought. 140 days, quadruple. $3k quadrupled is almost half what you need for wide open day trading. Takes discipline, knowledge, and intelligence. Hard work, way more than what your profits are worth. And a little luck certainly doesn't hurt.
Lastly, with a small account, DO NOT trade on your credit card, house or car note, or anything like that, and never trade on margin other than what will definitely be a day trade only. Trading, especially a trade of more than minutes in duration, with money you don't have, increases your exposure more than you can stand for long. Be careful with the short sales, too. Remember, zero is as low as a stock can go. So there is an ultimate limit to what you can lose on a long position. There is essentially no limit to how high a stock can go, and so no ultimate limit on your losses for a short position.
Statistics run solidly against you being successful, let's not kid ourselves about that. All I am saying is that it is possible, not likely, but possible, to become successful starting with a small account. And the PDT rule doesn't have to be the death knell for your idea.
