Thread: Day trading

You don't have the speed to place trades within microseconds, to have speed advantage, so you have to ask yourself whether you have the advantage of clever algorithms to identify market inefficiencies that persist over long periods.
You surely realize that every investment bank, hedge fund, private equity firm, etc. is paying hundreds of thousands a year to rather smart people whose job is to identify market inefficiencies and turn them into arbitrage. That would be your competition, except that you are underfunded compared to them.

It's absolutely possible to make a decent living out of this, but it's not easy. On the upside, if you can do it successfully,then you could easily increase your profit several times even orders of magnitude by selling those skills to a financial institution (if you like the insane lifestyle that it entails).

Originally Posted by gugi

You don't have the speed to place trades within microseconds, to have speed advantage, so you have to ask yourself whether you have the advantage of clever algorithms to identify market inefficiencies that persist over long periods.
You surely realize that every investment bank, hedge fund, private equity firm, etc. is paying hundreds of thousands a year to rather smart people whose job is to identify market inefficiencies and turn them into arbitrage. That would be your competition, except that you are underfunded compared to them.

It's absolutely possible to make a decent living out of this, but it's not easy. On the upside, if you can do it successfully,then you could easily increase your profit several times even orders of magnitude by selling those skills to a financial institution (if you like the insane lifestyle that it entails).

IF, and that's a big if, I was to make money off of this, I would definitely want to stay out on my own. I'm going to school to be a teacher so this would actually be a part time gig for me- I'm looking to get into currency exchange rather than equities- which can be done at any time of the day because the currency markets are open 24 hours a day five and a half days per week, so I would be doing this for 4 to 5 hours per night at most during the week after work.

Algorithms, systems, fast computers.... it's just gambling, pure and simple. Call it what it is, look it in the face. Ask yourself the question: how many successful gamblers do you know?

I wish you good luck if you decide to do it, but I somehow doubt your crystal ball is any better than the countless millions of crystal balls that went before you or will come after.

James.

Originally Posted by Jimbo

Algorithms, systems, fast computers.... it's just gambling, pure and simple. Call it what it is, look it in the face. Ask yourself the question: how many successful gamblers do you know?

Well, yeah, but I'm more than happy to gamble with the statistical advantage of the house, while I would be a complete fool to gamble with the disadvantage against it.

You could also asking yourself the question: how many successful casinos do you know?



The only trick is to be on the correct side of that zero-sum game (and have enough cash to weather the fluctuations)