Thread: Day trading

Good morning everyone,
I'm looking into getting into currency day trading as a hobby, but also- since I am currently out of work and going to school- to hopefully make a little money. Does anyone out there have any experience with day trading? Any and all advice is welcome and I thank you in advance for any responses that might come through!
Best regards,
Tony

Did back in the 80s,Your comment (make a little money,is funny) day trading is addictive big time,you could also lose ALOT of money like I did.

An acquaintance of mine does this, and he advised me (if I wanted to try it, which I don't really) to spend 6 months doing it as a paper exercise, keeping notes of what you would have bought/sold/made/lost, before committing any money. Sounded sensible.

Originally Posted by Matt69

An acquaintance of mine does this, and he advised me (if I wanted to try it, which I don't really) to spend 6 months doing it as a paper exercise, keeping notes of what you would have bought/sold/made/lost, before committing any money. Sounded sensible.

That's exactly what I'm going to do I'm going to work on paper for the first few months and then research as much as I possibly can during that time then I'm going to go to the actual training part.

I played the horses at Charles Town and at Saratoga "on paper" that way for six months. I knew a local bookie so I could have made bets, but decided to stick with fantasy betting before I did. The lesson I learned was that six months of study, research and fantasy betting would have earned me exactly one dollar. On the basis of that, I decided my time could be put to better uses. I never went back.

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 Matt69

An acquaintance of mine does this, and he advised me (if I wanted to try it, which I don't really) to spend 6 months doing it as a paper exercise, keeping notes of what you would have bought/sold/made/lost, before committing any money. Sounded sensible.

If you can't survive 6 months on paper like Matt says, then don't bother trying with real money

But as a small fish, you're basically just gambling. High frequency trading is done by firms with supercomputers and microsecond fiber connections to the trading houses, staffed by some of the brightest kids of the math classes. They're moving billions per minute to turn point percent differences into huge earnings. You really don't have a snowballs chance in hell at beating them at their game.

All you can do is ride their tail and hope that you correctly guessed which way they are going.

Originally Posted by pixelfixed

Did back in the 80s,Your comment (make a little money,is funny) day trading is addictive big time,you could also lose ALOT of money like I did.

I gotta think positively right lol! I hear it's really difficult I'm only going to put a limited amount of capital in it and use very little leverage.

No I have no crystal balls no special tricks up my sleeve just hope and a lot of balls. I will play around with it on paper first though if I don't feel comfortable doing it after that I won't do it at all- I won't waste my money. I don't even have a lot of money to lose- the thing is you get a lot of leverage with currency, which gives you more money to play around with, but since someone is backing me I won't be able to lose any more than what they're giving me! Thanks Gugi and jimbo, you guys are absolutely right about it being a gamble!

I think Day Trading is a great thing. My recent day trade was a Gillette DE for a Wade & Butcher DE. The key to day trading, is to get it done before the post office closes. Then you can ship it the same day. The worst trade is done on a Friday night, then you have to wait until Monday to mail it.