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 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.

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 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)