I've worked a regular full time non-trading office job for all of my life after undergrad. On the side i have executed some trades..sometimes round trips on the same day. Trading stuff like spy, vti, as well as individual stocks. The p/l were small....like $100 to $200 per pair of trades for example. I'd trade $10,000 worth of spy for example and would pocket $100 and joke that i made money for dinner. I've been doing this off and on for several years and have succeeded coming out on top 80% of the time or so. I'm in a position where income from my FT job could come to a halt and we'd still be ok. Should i consider trading full time? Should i at least try it out for a few months? 3-6 months perhaps? I've been thinking about trying this for a very long time.
Of course this is trading. There are some difficulties in taking it full time. Probably the biggest one is "over trading" in its various guises. For example, when you were an "amateur" you only took trades that were really attractive. When you become "professional" it's easy to feel a sort of obligation to be making money every second of the day. Try to avoid this as it could be that your good results as an amateur was partly due to your only getting involved when really attractive things came along. As for myself, I find it helps to play a really stupid on-line computer game while keeping an eye on the market. When I was a lot younger, I held stocks for minutes. I think the computers have taken a lot of those trades now so I now hold things longer. I would think you may be able to find profits at the time scale you're looking at. There are a bunch of other gotchas that hit beginning traders. Another form of over trading is to take on trades that have too much risk relative to your equity. If you have $10k in equity and are keeping your losses under $100 I think you're doing fine on that (i.e. keeping losses at 1% of capital with 80% profitable trades, LOL. See Edward O. Thorp's analysis of this in the appendix of his classic gambling book "Beat the Dealer"). But if you start trading for longer time periods, say holding for a week instead of a day trade, your risk (and reward, hopefully) becomes a lot larger and you have to reduce your size accordingly. Good hunting!
Definitely trading, as the previous poster suggested, watch out for daytraders' public enemy #1, over-trading. I suggest, lower the frequency of trades, and up the size, quality over quantity, and see how you do.
Unless you have banked at least one(three would be much better) years of money in the bank and get a part time job, the stresses will eat you alive, whereas have money to pay the bills each month takes off the strains of not having enough coming in. Most will say this is foolish, but stress is very high when you have to make money to pay rent/food/etc. Better to come prepared than not. It is also better to be layed off than quit.
Good suggestion, another alternative is to have a working wife take care of basic needs with her salary.
Scale up slowly. Take your time. You will find that when your living is dependent on making money each day, you might start to have bad habits. Stick to what worked before, just play a little bigger each week.
Trading casually is different to sitting infront of screen, casually you see a trade you take it, you dont you keep working, full time its tricky not to take bad trades, i can trade casually around work, but days intrade full time are generally negative. Not saying you shouldnt try, just thats the hurdle to overcome. Likely have a period between jobs, so give it a try.
mistake made by many is to confuse making trades with being a trader ===I'm in a position where income from my FT job could come to a halt and we'd still be ok.=== only if you have a method, and money, and time for its realization IMHO, by the time you will have all of the above (or at least believe that you have), you will not be asking forum what you should do