/biz/ - Business & Finance

[Anonymous No.611005]

Hey /biz/ is daytrading real as anything other than a partial hobby? Do people actually make a profit they live on daytrading or is it the same as just hopping around to different slots in a casino hoping for a payout.

[Anonymous No.611006]

It's real but rare.

[Anonymous No.611011]

>>611005
3-4% make a profit

[Anonymous No.611016]

>>611011

[Anonymous No.611017]

Is there actually something to it or is it mostly luck?

[Anonymous No.611019]

>>611017
There's actually something to it.

[Anonymous No.611038]

>>611019
Is it information or math?
I think it's information. Interpreting vast amounts of articles etc correctly.

I only made big profit once by investing in Tesla Motors before it peaked. After that I withdrew my money from stocks. Made some losses elsewhere, all in all I'm happy, but I want to return to stocks. More into daytrading than holding now. What do I need to know?

[Anonymous No.611089]

>>611038
>Is it information or math?
Neither.
You don't have to be a genius or need to be informed about the most recent news to be a successfull trader. All you need is a strong psychology,rational reasoning and a little bit of luck. You shouldn't overrate yourself and go all-in after you made some money the first months and lose everything. Be calm don't exaggeratte or panic and you will be a successfull trader. Anyone who is watching news all the time looking for the hottest trend in the market will probably lose a lot and will do so again.There are no secret ways in the market and there will never be. All in all you just need balls of steel and remain calm. Start learning the ways of the market and educate yourself. For starters I personally recommend The Cashflow Quadrant by Kiyosaki and the Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. Open a free practice account and start learning. As always learning is the key to success.

[Anonymous No.611098]

>>611089

what are the best things to use to buy and sell online?

[Anonymous No.611127]

>>611089
>>611089
Thanks for the reply. Quite helpful

[Anonymous No.611130]

>>611089
How is intelligent investor helpful to day traders? Isn't it based on technical analysis and trading derivatives mostly?

[Anonymous No.611131]

day trading seems like a absolute nightmare.

[Anonymous No.611148]

>>611016
You think that's too low or too high? Seems too low to me.

Not sure if any other broker types are required to publish reports, but there's a decent chunk of retail forex clients which turn a profit: http://forexmagnates.com/exclusive-q2-2014-us-profitability-report-oanda-and-fxcm-knock-off-ib/

[Anonymous No.611154]

>>611131

This.

How do day traders sleep? I bet they don't get much.

[Anonymous No.611191]

>>611005

There is a very small minority of individual day traders that are successful. I do know someone personally who has grown an account of $200,000 to over $14 million through real daytrading. Not penny stocks, not lucky bets. The guy was a genuine autist (assburger and zero social skills) and easily the smartest person I will ever encounter.

With the minute amount of successful traders, you can pretty much draw the conclusion that it is "not a real thing". If 1% of witchdoctors "cure" patients, you could reliably say that voodoo medicine is not really a thing.

There is a loud majority of scumbags who would try to convince you otherwise. The following: Ross Cameron, Timothy Sykes, Nathan Michaud, Bulls on Wall Street, Cemeron Fousbag - All an enormous pile of dog shit trying to sell the idea that it is easy to make a living watching flashy indicators and hindsight genius. These guys are all millionaires, with the vast majority of their fortune derived from selling this elaborate dream.

[Anonymous No.611203]

>>611154
actually thats one of the good parts of trading intraday, since you dont carry stuff overnight you dont have to give a shit what happens in overnight trade either.

[Anonymous No.611204]

>>611191
Did you ever ask your friend how he does it? Certainly not indicators. He has a method. A general pointer can be given.

[Anonymous No.611231]

>>611191
This lovely fellow here is spot on. It's a sad reality but it is reality.

When you really step back and think about the idea of the stock market, day trading and all that jazz, it's easy to acknowledge that it's all an elaborate pipedream pushed on the middle class in order to keep them middle class forever.

Wealth comes from production. You need to produce. Create something that convinces people to give you money. That's all there is to it. As it stands in the average persons mind, trading is something that you do once you get to a certain threshold of savings and you're done with your producing - you're giving the keys to this massive pool of cash and it's up to you to chose which net you use to pull out your share. But in what world does that REALLY sound like something that's genuine and authentic? Of course it's a fake concept, pushed on people at a young age through movies and television mostly, but also helped along by poor parents who don't understand it either.

Believe it or not I learned the most important lesson in investing from the television series The Sopranos.

Carmela, the protagonists wife, is terrified that her husband will die and she will be left with nothing. She bugs him constantly to give her 50,000 dollars so she can put them into stocks and build a little nest egg for herself.

However when she asks, Tony simply replies - "Stocks? You've gotta have those Enron type connections to make that stuff work - we aren't at that level yet."

And that's the truth to it all. If you aren't high enough up the chain to have access to insider trade knowledge you're never doing anything beyond betting on horses.

[Anonymous No.611261]

>>611005
>Hey /biz/ is daytrading real as anything other than a partial hobby?

From 1995 to 2005 was it? Yes.

Now? No. Other than a handful of very experienced old hands with a decent amount of capital.

> Do people actually make a profit they live on daytrading or is it the same as just hopping around to different slots in a casino hoping for a payout.

They did.

Just like computers can now beat the best human players in the world in chess, computers can beat the best humans in day trading. Any strategy you do can be done better in a black box.

Computers have not yet taken over fundamental stock analysis like Warren Buffett and Peter Lynch do. Computers rule with intraday trades, but people are still better at determining if a stock will go up in the next few years.

So either learn computer science and mathematics, or learn to read a balance sheet and do fundamental analysis.

[Anonymous No.611303]

>>611261
There are computers in London that can process one trillion trades a second in order to make micro gains which add up as time goes on. No human could possibly compete with that system.

[Anonymous No.611318]

What if you are a conservative tipe of investor but you "play" with a small amount of your capital?
If you can't make money with day trading why you think that it can be usseful to your life to learn about finance and economics?

[Anonymous No.611335]

>>611303
>No human could possibly compete with that system.

To be a successful daytrader you don't have to beat the computer system, you just have to be profitable. Sure, you'll never be anywhere near as efficient at trading as a supercomputer that's running custom software made by genius level economists and programmers, but if you know what you're doing then you can at least beat the Dow / S&P performance pretty easily, and that's better than what most people's "investments" do.

[Anonymous No.611336]

>>611318
>If you can't make money with day trading why you think that it can be usseful to your life to learn about finance and economics?
Because finance and economics has nothing to do with day trading.

[Anonymous No.611338]

>>611336
>Because finance and economics has nothing to do with day trading.
wut?
If finance and economics has nothing to do with trading what then, medicine? veterinary? swimming?

[Anonymous No.611348]

>>611335
I don't think you really understand what you're saying.

>you can beat the Dow/S&P pretty easily
>easily

You will not do this easily. People do not beat the benchmarks easily.

Who do you think owns these supercomputers?

>people's

[Anonymous No.611438]

>>611089
"Probably lose a lot" implies that they'd be more than often be deviating negatively from the market, meaning that the exact opposite method would extract profit.

[Anonymous No.611453]

>>611335
>>easily
Pros in charge of other peoples money cant beat s&p the majority of time

[Anonymous No.611488]

>>611338
human emotion and everybody's attempt at exploiting it.

[Anonymous No.611495]

This thread is full of shit. Name one study showing only 5% make it.

The markets are roughly 60-70% trading activity coming from retail and prop traders. It's mathematically impossible for 90% to lose. People are just gullible consumers that buy into anything posted on The Huffington Post and Wall Street Journal.

>inb4 some jack off posts a 20 year old study using data from a Korean futures exchange

[Anonymous No.611503]

>>611495

>It's mathematically impossible for 90% to lose.

Actually, it's not. It's theoretically conceivable for 1% of people day traders to make money and 99% to lose money.

>Name one study showing only 5% make it.

"Heavy day traders earn gross profits, but their profits are not sufficient to cover transaction costs. Moreover, in the typical six month period, more than eight out of ten day traders lose money. Despite these bleak findings, there is strong evidence of persistent ability for a relatively small group of day traders. Traders with strong past performance continue to earn strong returns."

So there you go. 80%+ fail. Gee, that was hard.

>b-b-but muh Taiwanese exchange

Daytrading is daytrading no matter where you are.

[Anonymous No.611511]

>>611503

>Actually, it's not. It's theoretically conceivable for 1% of people day traders to make money and 99% to lose money.

You're trying to say theory > math. That's not the case.

>"Heavy day traders earn gross profits, but their profits are not sufficient to cover transaction costs. Moreover, in the typical six month period, more than eight out of ten day traders lose money. Despite these bleak findings, there is strong evidence of persistent ability for a relatively small group of day traders. Traders with strong past performance continue to earn strong returns." So there you go. 80%+ fail. Gee, that was hard.

Transaction costs is one of the most bleak reasons losing traders lose. And a 6 month period is not even close to typical. That's not nearly enough data to declare a quantifiable conclusion.

>Daytrading is daytrading no matter where you are.

Now I know you've never traded before.

[Anonymous No.611520]

>>611191
>If 1% of witchdoctors "cure" patients, you could reliably say that voodoo medicine is not really a thing.

In your analogy. It's not one percent of witchdoctors who cure reliably. It's ~100% of witchdoctors with a ~1% success rate.

But by the anecdote about your friend you make it look like ~1% of people day trade with, well not a ~100% success rate, but a very high one.

Do you see the subtle difference?

I don't know if your analogy and anecdote really are indicative of reality. I'm just saying you're comparing apples and oranges.

[Anonymous No.611534]

>>611520
> comparing apples and oranges
I always wondered why that is a bad or illogical thing.

Clearly apples are superior.

[Anonymous No.611582]

It's also about how you define 'losing'. Most daytraders might not be losing money but they're underperforming the market, so in essence better results would've been had if they followed the index.

[Anonymous No.611633]

>>611005
>make a profit
>daytrading
95% loose their money in daytrading and all the money they loose is the money the other 5% daytraders win.

[Anonymous No.611661]

I used to run skimming algorithms on currency trades, exploiting small currency fluctuations with some economics theory involved.
They are designed to make about $30 an hour, but honestly I get about $25. It's pretty small and a rather frowned upon practice according to some brokers, so i wouldn't recommend it.

But it pays the rent.

[Anonymous No.611674]

Jesus christ so many uninformed people here. Daytrading is dumb as shit and is almost purely luck. When factoring in transaction costs, most daytraders cannot beat the market. No real reason to be a trader. Buy and hold is virtually always better.

[Anonymous No.611703]

>>611005
There are plenty of free simulators (Investopedia, MarketWatch etc.) which you can use to learn about different stocks and their respones to certain events.

E.g. Lockheed Martin's stock rising during the Ukrainian crisis and the USA's decision to start throwing bombs at Syria and Iraq.