How much could a person make in a day buying and selling stocks?

[OGOC]

1) I have to gain $10 before I lose $10. If I get down to $990 I close the account

Don't see how it's worth the bother then. If you lose on the very first trade, you're done. Unless you're trading one share at a time or something, which is fine, assuming you don't count fees in your win/loss.

I don't understand the point of the sell-before-the-close rule.

 

[brianmanahan]

If I do start an account these will be my rules:

1) I have to gain $10 before I lose $10. If I get down to $990 I close the account

2) I have to sell everything I have before close.

3) I will post the results, including info on trades I made.

i have heard similar guidelines before, and if you absolutely are insistent on day trading they are good to follow.

over at bogleheads ive seen people suggest that you put no more than %5 of your total net worth in the account to start, and then that is the only investment you are allowed to make. if you can manage to keep increasing it and beat the market and do fantastically, then that is great and more power to you. but if you get down to 0$, then your day trading days are over.

if you are truly going to do it, with an account value of 1000$ the fees will be a huge expense. it takes more money to lessen those fees but of course as uncle ben said, with great money comes great responsibility.

 

[brianmanahan]

I'm not going to do this now. I don't have that kind of money.

I might try after my parents pass. They're worth a couple mil.

protip: dont do it with the whole 2$ million :awe:

per the %5 rule, that would be 100$k max

 

[halik]

I might actually put $1000 into a trading account and try to make $10.

I can't believe all the people who are taking this so seriously. In NO WAY do I think I'm smartest human on the planet, and I was certainly not trying to belittle people who lost money in the market.

My only point was: It might be possible to make money consistently if you're satisfied with very small gains, the kind of gains professional traders don't consider worth their time.

Then (of course), true to ATOT, my post gets twisted in 10 different ways.


If I do start an account these will be my rules:

1) I have to gain $10 before I lose $10. If I get down to $990 I close the account

2) I have to sell everything I have before close.

3) I will post the results, including info on trades I made.

1) Why is being up $10 predictive of being up more? Conversely why is being down $10 predictive of being down more?

2) Is this to hedge overnight risk? Aka you'll be trading us equity only?

 

[Eug]

Do it, and then report back.

Then do it again for a few months, and report back to us on a daily basis.

$1000 bucks isn't much money, so it probably won't break you. It will be fun watching your progress.

I suspect it will serve as a nice education for you, but possibly an expensive one.

 

[Imp]

My "discount brokerage" has a $20 trading fee for accounts with less than $50k. Guess if you find one of those really cheap ones with $5/transaction, you'll only have to be down 5/995=0.005025 or 0.5025% before closing the account... okay.

 

[OGOC]

My "discount brokerage" has a $20 trading fee for accounts with less than $50k. Guess if you find one of those really cheap ones with $5/transaction, you'll only have to be down 5/995=0.005025 or 0.5025% before closing the account... okay.

The really cheap ones are more like $1 per transaction. Some banks give x number of free trades every month. But he'd probably have to deposit at least $10k to get these prices.

 

[Eug]

My brokerage is $29 per transaction, or else $10 above $50000. They go down to $7 if you make 150 trades per quarter.

My other brokerage is $25/$10/$7 for those tiers.

One company, Questrade, charges $5-$10 per trade, or else if you pay $90 (!) per month, then it's only $1-$7. However, they have a reputation of being a bit less reliable at times, and there's no way I'm paying a monthly fee for my brokerage accounts.

 

[yllus]

George Soros and Warren Buffett are not day traders. Buffett is the very antithesis of a day trader, as he popularized the theory of value investing.

What you seem to be talking about to date is watching stock tickers and simply quickly buying a stock that seems to be going up that day. That's completely nonsensical - as you have no information as to why the change occurred, you are literally taking a random bet. What do you think the odds are of a random bet that something will go A) up or B) down are? Couple that with transaction fees and you've got a great recipe for slowly and consistently losing money in your hands.

 

[paperfist]

You need momentum trading...

 

[Svnla]

Base on my research, unless you have inside information or a big bank account to back you up for the long term, an average person who is trying to do day trading will be like swimming naked and bleeding right in the middle of a bunch of hungry sharks.

 

[Staples]

You guys need a new broker.

Etrade is $10 a trade even if you do one trade a year.

 

[Eug]

I'm in Canada. One of my brokers is iTrade, which is the rebranding of ETrade after they were bought in Canada by one of the Canadian banks.

I pay $10 per trade, but that's because I reach their $10 threshold. Otherwise it would be $25 per trade.

 

[Miramonti]

No one is ever a success in daytrading, they have only succeeded thus far. The mental game is by far the most difficult aspect, and no one will ever master it to perfection. But someone can consistently make money doing it even thru the technological advancements - there are still tons of opportunities daily - if they are able to continue to refine their mental game and learn from their mistakes, and act on these learnings. Most fail but all who never swing at a baseball never hit it either.

Economists like to think of the 'free market' as an efficient system due to its dynamic absorption of the constant fluctuations in supply and demand, but it's these same dynamic changes that constantly lead to overbought and oversold conditions as human nature relentlessly looks for a bandwagon to jump on.