I still have to know a daytrader who makes money in the long run...
- Thread starter crgarcia
- Start date
I was stockbroker back then. I used to read articles in the paper talking about daytraders who were daytrading the leader of the day, and I couldn't understand why you'd want out of a stock that had a huge probablity of soaring the next day. I think that was an etrade office.
Now, I don't trust the bastards overnight. Knowing what I know about the games going on, I don't need the aggravation, even if it costs me returns.
How about starting a thread where you guys who were doing this with inferior technology and higher commish operated , or got started? That'd be interesting. Didn't the industry really start in the early ninties?
SP,
You bring up some good points and if trading has taught you to appreciate just who you are and what you have, then it has been a positive experience.
People live in a world that has socialised responsibility in order to gain control.
All of a sudden out of a moment of fear or greed ( two sides to fear) individuals leap into trading thinking that their academic record and dreamy thinking is going to win the day and break them away from the world that they know and from which they think they wish to escape.
They do not (cannot) realise that they are a carrier of the very disease they are trying to escape.
Frustration and self pity ( the underlying elements that drove them towards the promised land) kick in and the outcome is history, entirely predictable.
Ahhhh the promised land
regards
f9
Huh
You can trade whenever you want and from wherever you want, not many jobs offer that kind of freedom and pay so well.
The stats mean very little and aren't representative.
Daytraders, positional traders, investors, the majority of traders lose money, period.
Of course longer time frames, have you never heard of something called liquidity, some of their positions take weeks if not months to liquidate.
You can't expect an institutional trader to be able to use the same strategy as a private daytrader trading his own account.
Not everyone has the aptitude or ability to become a profitable trader, you can't really blame the market because it took you 9 years to find that out!
Huh? The stats aren't representative? Stats are inherently representative of what they are measuring. The majority of daytraders lose money. That's a stat, and it's representative of the cumulative P&L of the majority of daytraders. The OP for this thread specifically referenced daytrading, so your comments regarding position traders or investors are not pertinent.
That said, you'll see that the majority of my post indicated that consistently profitable daytraders are far from extinct.
I have known a group of traders for a number of years, interacting with ~15 of them on a daily basis in a private chatroom. At least 6 of them have YTD daytrading earnings in excess of $1M and I suspect that fewer than half of them have had a single down month in 2008. The <i>average</i> YTD returns for the 15 traders in the room is in excess of $800k, all from daytrading.
Certainly, successful daytrading is feasible. However, I'll stand by my prior post indicating that the majority of daytraders certainly lose money.
Ok maybe representative was the wrong word, ummm, how about meaningless, the point being that it's not really relevant whether the traders are daytraders or positional traders, most (new) traders lose money and by coincidence most (new) traders start by daytrading.
If most (new) traders were positional traders but the stats still showed that most daytraders lose money then it would mean something.
If most new traders were positional traders would the stats show that most positional traders lose money I wonder?
I agree with you totally, daytraders are far from extinct. I'm a daytrader myself, the worst kind. I scalp the forex market through a bucketshop but by some miracle and against all the odds I seem to make money consistently :eek:
Day trading is useless. You are just trading noise, nobody makes money doing that in the long run. You have to look for longer term trends that actually give you an edge. I believe you can be long term profitable entering and exiting positions every couple of weeks. The only time day trading was profitable was during the tech bubble.