$500 a day keeps the day job away

I think with a large enough bankroll you could do it. I'm in awe of the guys like warrior trading who can make 50k-250k a day.

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no it’s not, that dude was/is an idiot convinced he’d found an options cheat code. I’m talking about playing it straight...finding good trading setups with high success probabilities and doing it every day.

I don’t have the skill set for it but a lot of smart people do I think and don’t realize it. The question is simple, could you trade to make $500 every trading day and not have to work?

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Yeah, getting a $ return on a regular basis like this is way different than a guaranteed High % return.

I think it’s more than doable, just depends on the bankroll. If you have enough cash to leverage yourself and rely on very small % returns but that come out to $500+, you could do it.

Do taxes get more complicated on something like that? Or do most trading platforms have some nice end of year report to make it easy?

They have a nice year end report that makes it easy, with total gains and losses. Takes all of two minutes in turbo tax

You're trying to time the market on a day to day basis. I wouldn't mess with that.

If I had to try it I would identify stocks that are volatile but in no danger of tanking, and that don't trend together. That way I buy the dips and sell the spikes, then buy back in on the next dip.

But if I had a sufficient bankroll to make $500 a day from that, I wouldn't need to make $500 a day.

Cgrand— FYI I have started taking option trades from CML trade machine. If I start making $500 consistently I’ll let you know!

I will share no matter how good or bad

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My average is way over 500/day this year but I’ve been treating it like a full time job almost.

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But how much are you working with? If you’re working with $2 million, and making $750 a day, that’s a 9.38% annualized return.

That’s pretty good, but that’s well behind the historical average of S&P500 and on top of that, you would taxed at ordinary income rates for all gains, and those types of gains puts someone in anywhere from the 22% to 32% marginal brackets just in federal taxes.

Whereas with a buy and hold strategy, someone sill only he paying taxes on the dividends, and after a while at the far more favorable long-term capital gains rates.

So I’ve never done anything but just buy and hold and only sell when I feel like the opportunity cost of holding that asset is greater than the gains of another one (or to harvest losses for tax purposes). But IMO, if I were to start trading, other than maybe to hedge, the after-tax gains would have to be greater than the after-tax gains of buying and holding. And just using the S&P500 as the barometer, the gains from trading would have to be 12-15 percent annually to make it worthwhile.

That said, if that was my only or primary source of income, and I wasn’t reinvesting all or the majority of my gains, I guess my perspective would be different.

I definitely think I could do it, but I would have to quit my day job and focus solely on it. I only work half the year and on the days I can focus on technicals I do extremely well with options trades, almost exclusively trading puts.

This however is in my play account and I keep a base of 50k and will sometimes hold these positions for less than 10 minutes, don’t hold them overnight and obviously never, ever over the weekend.

I use SMA, EMA, MACD, RSI, but mostly watch moving averages and pull the trigger on crossovers. But it is very time intensive. I basically can’t be doing anything else.

Curious what the options master Jag_warrior has to say.