Curious if anybody on here is a successful day trader, if so what’s your best piece of advice to somebody starting out.

don't day trade if you are now buw something not too shitty and hold it

im not personally a day trading, swing trader at best but the best advice ive heard in general is the most important organ is your stomach, you gotta be able to handle days where you lose signficant amount of money and not panic

i day traded the entire bear market of 2020 and made about 200% return.

ama

This post was edited by thesnipa on Jul 21 2021 12:20pm

1. Position sizing. Don't go all in, ever. Even if you think something is 100% going to happen, just don't. When I trade, which I rarely do nowadays. I usually use like 1/10th or less of my overall portfolio if i'm doing options.

2. Try to develop some system. Test that system. For example you could do paper trading (trading with fake money) on Thinkorswim. Do that for like a month and test your trades with a pretend 10k, 100k or whatever. If you have the time to do so do it, because it'll help you validate some of the moves you plan to make with real money.

3. Be vigilant about educating yourself. Like if you expect to make money trading consistently, it won't work unless you're plugged in. Follow key people on twitter, read news daily, etc.

4. Be disciplined, if a trade is not working out, don't sit there hoping that eventually it will, set some sort of stop-loss or level that you will sell regardless. That's how you usually get trapped and the trade turns into an investment. Successful traders aren't right all the time, the key is to just be right more often than you're wrong.

Most of these things aren't easy and actually require a commitment and time, that's why i'm personally moving away from it. These are just a few things off the top of my head. If you have a regular 9-5, it's astoundingly difficult to be a good trader.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Jul 21 2021 12:38pm

I day traded for about 3 years trying different strategies and at the end of it all I ended up about break even but more than likely slightly red (lost maybe a couple thousand?) I view that as success because most people end up blowing up their account and take them selves out of the game.

My best advice would be if your starting out and plan on learning from someone do your research and don’t get scammed by some fake guru marketing day trader lifestyle on their Instagram. This isn’t a get rich quick scheme, you’re going to have to put in an incredible amount of work to find your style/strategy you are good at that consistently makes you money.

Your also going to have train your mind and emotions to detach from the money. From my experience you’re going to need to make rapid decisions with thousands of dollars on the line without letting emotions interfere. You will need to develop a system and rigorously follow it so your emotions are not part of your trading system.

I hope this helps, I could go on and on haha but feel free to pm or post here if you have more questions! I’m now swing/position trading. Less stress, lower risk, and capturing a much bigger move. Best of luck

Buy high sell low

I tried it 2019 and found out a lot about myself. Namely I was not as disciplined that I believed myself to be. I made strict rules about position sizes and stop losses and betrayed those rules.

I checked myself and decided to eliminate option trading all together and have been doing shares since , mid/longterm and done quite well.

Day trading not for the faint of heart but if you’re disciplined and pretty good with Elliot waves, I think you can do really well. I am ok at Elliot waves, but lack the discipline. Gl to you tho

Thank you all for the advice, hope this thread helps everybody out

Start small

Keep learning

Its hard