Since I'm now posting in this thread, I guess I should give my short story...
I watched the market for the past year or so, waiting for a significant drop to enter in. Kept thinking a big drop was coming because I thought most stocks were overbought. This year, January, finally decided if you can't beat em, join em, and ride the wave. Decided I would do some day trading with some investment money I had sitting around (I also invest in real estate...also an overbought market IMO) and by "day trading" I don't mean sitting in front of a computer all day, but a few trades a day while doing other things. Did OK for a bit, then did really well at the last Amazon earnings report, then learned some hard lessons, and once the market started to drop I kept learning more lessons about volatility. As they say, much easier to make money (especially any form of day trading) in the stock market when it just goes up, up, up.
I went from being up $4k in a month to about even, and now I'm back in the green by shorting stocks since lately nothing is trending up (not even gold). Strange to be doing the complete opposite now as I compared to when I started, especially when most are losing money. Feels a bit like jumping off a building with others, pushing someone else as they fall, then having a teleport button (my stop loss order) that puts me back in the building with a bag of money. Rinse and repeat with Expedia stock today. My wife and I do have some long term stock investments (IRA, 401k)...I told my wife this was probably "that drop I was waiting for" early on and put the IRA in a Money Market account which seems to have been a good/lucky decision. Speaking of luck, there is no doubt a lot of that when it comes to stock market trading. The rest is research and discipline in my opinion. I've watched countless day trading videos and articles and anyone claiming to know "the answer" about this stuff is full of it if they don't at least acknowledge the luck factor. I don't think it's quite like gambling, but it gets close depending on your trades/strategy. And sure, buying and holding good companies long term is the safest way to make money at this, but for some of us that's just not enough So for those who have wanted to be more involved and hear a first account, I hope this was worth it.