Would like to know, if the most of you hold more than $ 25,000 in your account for swing and daytrading. I mean although being a swing trader you have to watch your open position so you could have more than three daytrades in a 5 day periode (PDT-Rule) Also a swing trader has to close his open position when the market turns against him.
Or you could trade the new e-micro mini futures and not be bothered with any PDT. https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/equity-index/us-index/micro-e-mini-futures.html
With this guy, you could run 100pt SL's and swing YM and NQ for instance. much less work that keeping on track of many stocks but you in doing so lose the stocks strength / weakness, but pretty much all pulled around by the news.
If your account is under $25,000, and you never did more than 3 day trades in any 5 days, you can keep margin and just not day trade. Once you are tagged PDT, the account needs to stay above $25,000 or you are closing only.
I know that. My question refers to the account size of the average swing or day trader here, when they started trading.
There are plenty of successful swing traders that make on avg less than 4 or 5 trades per week. An account of about $5k is what I had started trading with and now have well over the PDT. Following the PDT rule will probably increase your chance of success since it keeps you from over-trading and should encourage you to let your profits run longer. * The PDT rule was changed a few years ago, it is now 4 trades within 5 days.