I would say that's closer but it's still extrapolated off of closed accounts. I blew up three before I started to be consistent and I doubt I am unusual.
Get that degree, whatever the major. Even if you go the daytrading route there is no assurance of success (90%+ fail). BTW, get the degree in whatever you really like. If you don't like accounting, don't go there.
Day trader appears to be great career but imho it was invented by brokerages to take your hard earned capital. Very few win the long run. Learn to trade and invest properly.
I've been down that road, and while I avoid recommendations, I'm perfectly happy to tell you what worked for me. First of all, of the videos you mentioned, the only one with which I'm even slightly familiar is Timothy Sykes, but I wasn't very impressed with that guy and my impression was that he focused an awful lot on shorting stocks, which has its problems. Personally, I was more inclined to watch videos put out by guys like AJ Monte of TheMarketGuys, Harry Boxer of TheTechTrader, Stephen Whiteside of Stock Market Timeing, and Hubert Senters. Oh, and by the way, you can't Day Trade stocks anyway unless you have $25,000 in your trading account (given that the SEC and FINRA enacted Rule 2520, the Pattern Day Trader Rule, to try to prevent people from getting in over their heads). I've probably taken too long to share the fact that the MOST valuable lessons I ever learned came from visiting the trade rooms of successful traders when they opened "their doors" for a FREE trial, and watching them trade in real time. It's how I learned to adopt the right mindset, which was KEY, and totally different from how I approached trading previously. I'm talking about watching the likes of Scott Barkley at ProAct Traders, AJ Monte at TheMarketGuys, Anne-Marie Baiynd of TheTradingBook, and Nick McDonald of TradeWithPrecision. Speaking of Trade with Precision, I have found it MUCH easier to make a daily profit trading Forex than trading stocks, plus shorting foreign currency pairs doesn't entail the same complications as shorting stocks. Oh yeah, as for trading penny stocks, I'd be surprised if you find the effort worth it. The behavior of these stocks is just too bizarre. To me, it makes more sense to simply purchase fewer shares of stocks priced over $5.00. But like I said, my attention now is mainly focused on foreign currency pairs because I find it so much EASIER to make money there. I took my strategy to Trade2Win in June of 2016 to test my system publicly (to keep me honest) and all (I'm being hyperbolic) the swing traders and position traders wrote to tell me how I didn't know what I was doing and "you can't be consistently profitable as a day trader." But after I started calling all my trades IN ADVANCE and proving how they were just about ALWAYS successful (like about 90% of the time) it shut them up pretty quick. When someone tells me I can't trade using a one-minute chart because all I'm looking at is noise, all it says to me is that THEY don't know how to trade off a one-minute chart. (I use five-minute, one-hour, and daily charts as well.) I will try to upload a file from the Forex demo account I used last week (on Thursday and Friday) to test a new theory I had on how I might even further fine tune my system (as a means of half-way verifying that I'm not just talking a bunch of nonsense here) and to show you that it IS possible to learn how to day trade profitably if you can come up with your own sound strategies based on principles shared by the likes of sp500chart.com (Jim Roof - oldschoolchartist), Ann-Marie Baiynd, AJ Monte, Scott Barkley, Nick McDonald, Stephen Whiteside, Hubert Senters, Harry Boxer, and Jarratt Davis (I forgot about him).
Expatiated, I am a fairly new trader as well and am losing my shirt. Which is why I came to this forum. I have many questions. For example, how much time do you have to spend each day, to make a profit?
clylec305, As I wrote in my post, the image I uploaded was from a Forex demo account I used last week to test a new theory I had on how I might further fine tune my system. I don’t know what the ROI is, but this particular demo account was set up in a ridiculous manner. The opening balance was far more money than I actually have. The leverage was 1:100, which is twice the maximum I can trade where I live (the USA), and I upped my average trade size from an unrealistic (for me) 5 lots to a totally ludicrous 8 lots. Moreover, the average win-to-loss ratio was way under the professional 1:1 minimum. I recently opened another demo account with Ally Forex (I think they used to be Trade King) with an opening balance of $500 leveraged at 1:50. Once I am finished honing this new approach based on last week’s developments/insights, and in a manner that abides by the 1:1 minimum win-to-loss ratio, I will apply it to the Ally account to determine what kind of results a novice trader might be able to expect using this version of my system. Wishbone, It’s my understanding that there are a lot of traders who make a profit by only trading the first couple of hours following the open of a given session. When I first started trading, I was trying out all kinds of indicators such as MACD, CCI, RSI, ADX, and stochastic oscillators. I ended up rejecting ALL of them and now trade based on key levels that I identify in advance. This means I can plot a horizontal line at the appropriate level and let the trading software alert me when the target is breached. As a result, if I wish, I only have to monitor my charts at those times when an alert is signaled. On the other hand, when I sat down to quantify what I did last Thursday and Friday that led to 18 consecutive successful trades (17 of which were made during the Sydney, Tokyo, and London sessions) I discovered that it appears this particular adaptation of my system will allow me to set my stop losses and take-profit targets at the beginning of each 24-hour cycle and then walk away. The success rate and the 1:1 win-to-loss ratio should take care of profitability—theoretically. However, what I had to do LAST WEEK to get those results was keep returning to my laptop every hour during those three sessions (over about a 14-hour time period) to see if there were any good setups. I have my own proprietary method of assessing market structure and trade opportunities that uses MULTIPLE simple moving average envelopes (so far, I'm the only person I've seen anywhere who uses envelopes within envelopes) and a style that I call "guerrilla trading."
You need to apply your strategy to fully funded account. You'll realize it'll take on a totally different persona when real money is put at risk.