Stock Trading and Other Things

How many of you have made money day trading and how much money did you need to start?

mainly i want to know if there are alot of people out there that do make a living at this and how much it took to get started. What was the worst loss they took. what kind of connection to the net did they use. what speed of computer did they use. What to look for in a daytrading firm. I would like to daytrade.

Public Comments

1. well I know people who do it for a living, and they all have different lifestyles, so there is no set amount to start with (although 2 years salary is a good choice).

my advice is that you MUST be able to stick it out and accept losses, because there WILL be losses, and some could be huge. if you're under 40, dont even think about it because odds are you dont have enough saved up and any big loss will end your career quickly.

most of them use broadband connections so that they get fast streaming updates, and I know some go with E*Trade...

but again, I'll warn you right now, you MUST have alot of money saved up, and you MUST be willing to accept huge losses at times and be able to cover them...

2. If you buy 1000 shares of a $40 stock and let it move $.25 and then sell it you just made $250 minus commission.

What do you do if it goes down? What if one out of 200 times you do this the stock goes down to $30 instead of up to $40.25 and two times out of 200 it goes to $35 and 10 times out of 200 it goes to $37.50?
187 times you make $250
1 time you lose $10000
2 times you lose $5000
10 times you lose $2500
You just made $1750 in 200 days, nice living.

Are you willing to put a stake of $40000 up and have to be correct 187 times out of 200 in order to make $1750?

The people who make money day trading are the people with "systems" or software to sell you. They can't predict that one time when you buy in when the stock is about to drop off the table or even $1.50 which is a disater for a day trader.

FYI there are not any professional day traders, there are people like you who get sucked into it with the idea of not having to work hard to make money, they lose and lose and lose and I hope you won't do the same thing.

3. I am day-trading with TD Waterhouse part time. I started with $10,000. three years ago and my investment is up considerably. I am still not ready to daytrade fultime. I use high speed internet connection. Study and research the company before you invest. Good luck

4. I use weekly and day trades when I have the time away from work.

The best way to look at trading is you'll never live off it for a while, because its always about compounding, and your wins being bigger than your losses. This means drawing an income from it means it really screws it up.

I invested £1000 - thats about $2000 in a weekly trading system, and I have now got it up to £3000 or $6000 in about 6 months, and I made mistakes at first. This will continue, as long as I follow the systems rigidly. I use spread betting rolling markets (futures) on the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the greman Dax. Day trading can definately make you money, using weekly trades can make just as much on a spread market, using rolling stops and trigers, the great thing is you losses are limited to whatever you want but your profits are unlimited, and the spreads are cheap! Making money of trading systems do actually work, but its all about following the system and the market with discipline, and never try to make too much too quickly.

Biggest win in a weekly trade = £800
biggest defeat weekly = £400
Day trade biggest win = £520
worst day trading = £210

I use a normal 10 meg line, and a spread betting company which has a good platform. Look for trading systems on the net, theres load of them, check out the systems and as long as it makes sense, buy them.

You need about £1000 for each system to make any sort of money quickly.

Hope this helps.

5. I will give you what info that I can. Although there are many others who are far more expeienced with daytrading than I am. I have tried many different kinds of stock trading, including daytrading. Of them all, daytrading is my least favorite. It may not be the most work (but it ain't easy), but it's definitely the most stressful. In my experience there are far easier ways to make money in the stock market.

By law the minimum amount needed to open a daytrading account is $25,000. This will open a margin account, with which you can daytrade up to four times the amount that you have in your account. So with a minimum account of $25,000 you can daytrade up to $100,000 per day. (There are some restrictions) You must pay interest on any amount that you hold overnight that is in excess of the cash in your account. Daytraders never hold anything overnight.

There are many different styles of daytrading. You can trade gaps up, or gaps down. You can trade technicals or breakouts. You can trade a particular stock or group of stocks. Each style requires a specific set of tools and the skills to use them. At a minimum you will need a good broadband internet connection, streaming level 2 quotes, and a good broker. Quotetracker is a good, free platform that you can download and try, just to get a feel for what is involved. Also I believe that Scottrade will let you download and try their platform for free.

The broker that you choose depends upon your style of trading and the volume that you trade. Flat fee commission brokers like Scottrade are fine if you trade volumes above 1000 shares at a time. On a thirty dollar stock, that's $30,000 per trade. Personally I may buy more than 1000 shares, but I'll often take a position 100 shares at a time. So in my case paying $7 for each of those 100 share trades would kill me on commissions. Instead I use a broker that charges per share, not per trade. If you're not dealing in high volume it's best to pay per share, not per trade. That way you can buy 100 shares and it will only cost you $1 in commission.

The other thing that you should consider, just in case you do make money daytrading, is taxes. Although the advent of online tax services has made keeping track of all those daytrades considerably easier, it can still be a headache. It's much easier just to buy a stock, hold it all year, and then pay the taxes on it. Very simple.

I do not believe that daytrading is the best way to go for a beginner. It would be better to start by just buying and holding, or swingtrading. Personally I now use a service that sends me alerts on what to buy and sell. It actually works much better than I could ever do on my own, and it's a whole lot easier. Still it's quite common for me to lose $1000 or more per day. But on average my up days far outweigh my down days.

Yes, I do this for a living, and it is much easier than having a real job.

6. There is one fact: you will lose money at the beginning. The successful ones all have different trading styles. I daytrade/swing trade the same 25 stocks all the time. Usually only trading in about 5 at one time. $25K is the minimum you can start with.