I listed many reasons for why so many are failing at day trading and failure to treat trading like a business is one of those reasons. My point with that was that even if a trader is trading as a hobby...he/she should still treat it as a business. Other reasons listed was lack of discipline, under capitalization, lack of risk management, trading the wrong trading instruments, poor stress management and so on. I define hobby traders as part-time retail traders or retail traders with another source of income that's their primary income source. My point, you don't need to have trading as your sole source of income to be able to treat it as a business. I think too many traders that have a job fail at recognizing their hobby trading can be treated as a side business. That's why I mentioned in the recent past stories about very successful athletes, entertainers, business owners with other businesses on the side that have absolutely nothing to do with their primary source of income. A casual friend of mine has owned three subway stores for about 10 years now...successful stores. He recently (two years ago) built an indoor hockey training arena...he turned a profit this year in that business. Simply, now he has two completely different successful businesses...one full-time and the other basically part-time (he has a full-time manager for his hockey arena). I just think hobby traders need to be more focus on the business aspects of trading...just maybe they'll have a better chance at being profitable traders...possibly being able to do such full-time one day. Heck, my sister is a full-time head nurse at one of the top prestigious hospitals in the U.S. all while owning a successful day care business that caters to high end clients. She manages it part-time while her best friend manages it full-time although my sister is the sole owner. Life for us today isn't like it was for our parents. Our parents basically had the economics of one job by one parent takes care of the family. Economics today...we need to have a plan B on the side just in case something goes wrong with plan A...two jobs or both parents work. You may be right. If that happens, hopefully the exchanges and regulators can "remove" a lot of those "special privileges" the HFT firms and like are getting. Reality, these proposed taxation laws have been around since the 90's even when Hilary Clinton made headlines back then as a trader herself (very profitable hobby trader) before her hubby became president...although she admitted most of her trading was due to advice from friends in the futures markets (e.g cattle trading). She turned a small trading account into a large trading account all while holding down another job.
Of course.....as creating algo's requires a lot of skills....big data, statistics, SQL, coding, testing, etc. Most quant firms have a bevy of PhD's on their staff to do this stuff. It's not easy.
Every job seems like it has "grim" prospects. But just like anything, only a very select few will truly succeed fruitfully -- it has been like that since the beginning of time... ...ever since I started trading, successfully, I have stopped reading news articles. -- most are just noise and pollution for the brain.
So what does this mean for someone newer to the markets that is was hoping to turn trading into a career? as wrbtrader said, I like that you say to have other plans as a backup...this makes sense. However, is trading something worth getting into if we assume that everything in that article is correct? Is it only day trading that is fucked or is trading into the daily-weekly timeframes going to be substantially less profitable also?
Sanders has no chance of being elected and Hillary is owned by Wall Street. We independent traders provide the same benefits to the market as the elephants albeit in miniature. In aggregate, it's much more substantial. We provide liquidity and make markets. If the grim reaper comes, it comes, meanwhile I'll be going long or going short.
Exactly, HFT firms are making a lot and buying politicians with the proceeds. They'll make sure the tax won't apply to them. Best we can hope for is that brokers, motivated by profit, will introduce products exempts from this ridiculousness or who knows, migrate to friendlier territories.