Quoted from Parzival:What does everyone think about the viability/sustainability of day trading? I work from home full time (lots of time to monitor), and have always kept quite a bit of cash in savings (which gets basically nothing in interest).
I recently put 30K into my TD account, and have been doing some simple trades. My thought is to monitor a series of stocks, and day trade one or multiple of them a day depending on trends/market conditions. By doing so, the goal would be to make a couple hundred dollars (or more) more days than I lose a couple hundred or so dollars. I wouldn't plan on holding long term, just round-trips.
I'm relatively young (33), only debt is a mortgage, and have separate retirement accounts. Thoughts/advice?
I did technical day trading for about 2 years off and on.
1. It takes a tremendous amount of time because you have to constantly be watching
2. You have to be quick
3. You will lose some and have to be mentally okay with that and LET GO of those stocks
4. Day trading rules / wash rules
Most people lose more than they win because they cut the winners too soon and don't get rid of the losers soon enough. If you can keep your losses low, you're ahead of the pack.
Ultimately, I don't see an issue with it occasionally, but to try to do it constantly can be stressful. I would suggest finding a group on slack or discord that you can join that has the same goals. In these scenarios you aren't planning on holding, you are only looking at short term technicals.
I was lucky in that I actually did pretty decent at it, but I am very conservative in my plays. One bad play can wreck any profits you had. I saw many people lose a lot of money. I did have a few I bag held for a year or so (FTFT being one of them) and I was okay with those never coming back, but I lucked out in that both of those eventually came back and made very nice profits. The smarter play though woudl have been to sell them and put that money elsewhere.