While the study was conducted on entrepreneurs, I think the same applies to trading. I hear a lot of people want to jump into trading full-time. The most successful entrepreneurs(traders are entrepreneurs as well if you think about it) are the ones who kept their day job for YEARS until their business finally takes off as they scale up. Great lesson here with a bunch of rigorous research to back it up. Take heed padawans. ============================================= https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/...00-entrepreneurs-has-a-surprising-answer.html They looked at more than 5,000 people in the U.S. who became entrepreneurs during the 15-year period in question. The study participants were in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s, and they started a wide variety of businesses. Regardless of industry, the researchers were seeking the answer to that age-old question: When starting a business, are you more successful if you keep or quit your day job? There was a pretty definitive answer: Those who kept their day jobs were 33 percent less likely to fail in their new venture. In other words, you're not just better off keeping your day job--you're way better off keeping it. Consider a few examples: Phil Knight spent five years selling his athletic shoes before leaving his full-time job in accounting. The company he started? Nike. Sara Blakely developed her idea for Spanx over the course of years, and kept her full-time job selling fax machines in the meantime. Forbes currently estimates Blakely's net worth at $1 billion. Markus Persson was a programmer who built video games on the side. He first put up Minecraft, unfinished, on a gaming portal. He kept his day job for a full year before committing to Minecraft full-time, eventually selling it to Microsoft for $2.5B Now pay attention to those timelines: All three of these massively successful entrepreneurs spent not just weeks or months at their day job while developing ideas into billion-dollar companies--they punched the clock for years while building their business on the side. Years.
And while the odds are pretty slim of an entrepreneur's side hustle turning into a full-time venture, they're considerably higher than someone making a long-term living day trading...especially if they're not really well-capitalized and don't have a very robust method.
Here's a good example. This guy got up to six figures a month...from his options trading service. He's never publicly said what his returns or profit is from actual trading: https://www.smartpassiveincome.com/podcasts/8-year-hobby-blog-6-figures-per-month-business/
Actually a very good interview. He provided a great service to his customers. He met a void in the marketplace. Great product/market fit if we are using Product Manager speak. Again, it took him 8 YEARS before he got to the point of making six figures a month. And he had institutional/Wall St background. I would assume he would making nice mid six figure salaries too working in M&A on Wall St. all those years before he went full-time with his service. Therefore, we can safely arrived that he was: 1) knowledgeable 2) well capitalized (years of working on Wall St on M&A) 3) patient (he was blogging and providing free content for years before charging and scaling up) Contrast this with the average noobs here on ET asking if they can make it with $2500 in their accounts and have little to no experience trading. Gotta stack the odds of succes on your side. I think ANYBODY can be successful at daytrading but it takes a very very very looooong time to internalize all the market patterns, risk management, position management, etc. So the best advice for noobs is get a job and trade an hour or 2 a day. Build up consistency. After 3-5 years if you are still interested in trading and have built up a nice account level with good trading knowledge and experience, then go full-time! It ain't going to happen in 3 months or 6 months. Even 1 year is rare. Some people get lucky and got in Bitcoin or a hot penny stock and their money triple or 5x or whatever. But they rarely kept their gains. I know from experience in the past. When I had small $2K accounts. At one more I more than 5x. But I never kept those gains. Now my account size are significantly bigger but more importantly my gains are more steady.