Quote from jack hershey:
Quote from IronFist:
So people in their 20s aren't supposed to post on ET? wtf?
I'm 25 and I've been interested in day trading for a few years now. I also work another job and invest/swing trade on the side. Silly me for coming here to learn about trading. Maybe I should just jump into day trading without studying or learning anything first. Then, when I lose all my money in a month or two, I can join ET and make posts full of bad grammar about how day trading sucks but then say that I make $1000k a day minimum in polls. I can also flame other people for doing research and being young. [/QUOTE
It is great for anyone to post.
The first comparison you made was right on. Individual pro and amateur accounts make good returns where they focus. There is a broad range of results.
The big money is more or less SOL if their track records are the tell.
I started to trade at about your present age so I can't say when is a better time to start from personal experience.
The youngest persons that I have watched were people finishing high school and getting ready for college. All of them, over a 10 year period, had good capital to start with and they did trading like you do. A few had trusting parents to the extent that they were able to increase their capital by the amount of a year's tuition at that time.
One gal knocked on my door at midnight a few years later. She was on a roll when she turned 21 (Math major at Middlebury College). So she didn't fit the mold for young millionaires.
At first, I spent 5 years trading EOD and slowly building capital and compounding. I added 50% of my pay as well. When I quit professional employment, I was paying my salary weekly in commissions to my broker. It was a peculiar feeling. The expenses of the capital making money for me were equal to what I could earn based on my college training.
Life for a young person these days is a stellar trip in terms of building wealth. there is real data and there are things to trade in a highly leveraged way. I suppose the typical posting here by young people doesn't exhibit the extent of the opportunity. you seem squared away for learning about it. others are not so fortunate as you are.
The wild stuff you see posted by some extreme young people is certainly varied and unusual. getting it wrong and believing you are right is a real stumbling block. I tink a lot of young people know enough about computers that they can figure out that a huge pile of money is there. But on the otherhand they do misread hw markets work for some reason. Look at the gap thread and see how a young person has the opposite take on what is happening.
I do look at the posts your critic is making; they are all over the lot and have little coherence. My guess is that you are perking along much better off than he is. And he actually moderates two different ET threads.
Go for it and have a great time of it.
sorry to make such a long quote, but i love it when people have intelligent things to say....i am making money on the markets but am looking to make more, so i study how others are doing it, but their way never seems to work for me, so i go my own way.
started looking at futures trading a couple months back, then paper traded (boring), then traded a few contracts, then really jumped in. now i'm mostly (pretty much exclusively) scalping and that seems to work, but the wins are small and therefore the money comes slowly. moreover, since i'm relatively new at it, i can't bring myself to trade more than one or two contracts at a time, making the amounts extra small. my self-imposed quota is $100/day for now (net positive, and i don't trade every day). i guess that means if i upped the size of my trades (i.e. more contracts) i could up the size of the wins. well, maybe in the future, when i feel more confident. for now, i'm sticking with small wins and losses. when i consistently make 80-90% winning trades and $100/day without more than 5 rt's, then maybe i'll consider doubling the size of my positions (i.e. more contracts)
i guess some people are awesome traders (i try to learn from them - not easy) and can make consistently over 100% returns. i'm not one of them. to me, it's easier to make bigger returns on super winner stocks swing traded, so that's what i mostly do, but could do better. futures trading i suppose could do big returns too, but to me seems riskier, so i don't have the stomach for going all in with numerous contracts. maybe as my experience grows, so will my confidence. we'll see.
i'm trying to get back to the original question of how much gain per day is possible. heck if i know...but seems to me that would depend on the trader.
:eek:
