re: How many of you guys/gals day trade and have made it your career?

Ancient Tiger is the GOAT day trader!!!

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It can be stressful at times, but also very lucrative (if treated as a true business, and not just a dabble) and the trader has the ability and desire to manage risk and follow a tested rules based trading system, it’s a pretty good gig. But like any business, apart from the trading side, you also must have sufficient capital (especially when you’re just getting started), realistic expectations and a solid business plan WELL before you try to go full time.

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Jag nailed it. If you want to make a career out of it, it takes on average 4-5 years of dedication to learning and honing your craft to be able to support yourself or a family (obviously depends on how much income you need and what responsibilities you have, young single dude is ideal candidate for it).

I’ll say the thing most people don’t understand about trading is that to do it at a high level requires an absolute understanding of yourself at a very deep level.

Having the tech and data feeds is easy. We can get API connections and run our own models and all that jazz but it doesn’t matter if you have an ego, the need to be “right” or have no discipline to hold yourself accountable.

It’s one of the very few occupations where you have no boss, no coworkers, no subordinates and no customers. You can have a trading partner or mentor but only you can hold yourself accountable when no one is looking over your shoulder as you go on tilt. It’s made me a 10x better person because of it but most won’t look themselves in the mirror that hard.

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I have sold winners too soon, and have held losers too long.

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I mean, I think all traders do this to a degree. The more you can be consistent (regardless of right, just following the math), the better you will likely do in trading.

If you're consistently "wrong" nothing will help you. The art is balancing consistent and "right".

Flip a coin a thousand times winning at least more than you lose on the other and you have positive expectancy. Most people don’t have either enough edge to have a predictable win rate (50% in the coin example), or they have an edge but still don’t know the statistical win rate. Because the “win” rate depends on far or close your take profit is relative to your stop loss. If you win 2x what you lose, and odds are 50/50, you only need to be right 33% of the time to break even (1/1+n) where n=win ratio.


So even if you found a pattern that reliably wins 2x to what you lose, if it only happens 20% of the time you will lose money in the long haul.

So then it’s about knowing yourself. Can you take loss after loss repeatedly to execute a system with a 30% win rate even if your RR is 3 or 4:1? Can you stomach the drawdown? There’s a chance you may get 20 “tails” in a row with a coin flip and you go bankrupt.

Or do you want to be right all the time and win 80% of your trades? Typically to do so requires an inverse RR where you win a small amount a lot but when you lose it’s more than a single win.

All about the expectancy, your ability to execute it and stay consistent. Not as easy as it looks.

I have not lost a trade since 2022.

But I only daytrade s&p 500 ETFs. And if they're losers I just turn them into swing trades. It's the s&p, it will recover eventually. If I get stuck not a huge deal (a solid chunk got stuck for 4 months last year).

This has been my solution to dealing with emotions. I couldn't deal with the whole stop loss part of trading.

I realize this may not be considered "real daytrading", but it works for me. It allows me to enjoy trading without my emotions destroying trades.

I'm a big s&p 500 index guy for retirement funds so being stuck in an s&p fund doesn't bother me at all.

p.s. I only trade with fun/leisure money left over after I max out retirement vehicles.