Your first $1,000 day, or 500 or 100 day...might as well be the same as winning the Lottery. You generally feel the same elation...your Eyes, and mind, Greatly expands to further horizons and new potentials, As an employee, that would be an absolute impossibility. You are automatically, significantly capped on your potential earnings range. It's like firing explosives on a Dam, but instead of a one-time deal...you can potentially do it...over and over again, each new day, or each new trade, For the collective masses, a steady job is the obvious, way better option. -- But for the select few who can truly make this trading thing work...the income potential is absolutely crazy. And my Trading Academy will show all of you how that can be accomplished. It's 2018...Make Trading and Your Life Great Again...High-Five`
As employee you are guarantee an income. You work you get paid. It is different for trading. You trade and sometime you don’t get paid at all or you paid Ms. Market instead.
I had thought of that but the only people I've met who actually made it as a career were studying full time. You may be different. It just seems that guys rarely make good money until they are unencumbered by the phone ringing. I know a couple of trading educators who say the mixed trading with work but they were just bad traders who became educators Of course it depends, I am a futures day trader, the rewards are massive but the skills required are very time consuming.
My first thousand dollar day was actually rough because I was trading like most of you guys and gambling. I actually was once trading pennies, and I made thousands doing it. The caveat is, I lost all of it back. I stopped trading completely due to the losses, but eventually I decided to come back to trading. And, now I trade in the millions. If you’re wondering, no I don’t trade pennies and I wouldn’t touch them with a ten foot pole now. Even if you lose, just keep going. Keep reading and keep learning, that information you’ll get is worth every second.
There is no feeling, its odd. Just calm. There are far more intense feelings when you are down. So you do everything possible to never get to that. (stop losses/trail stops). You have to get to huge multiples of net worth to make difference in quality of life.
It's just a trading goal, my next one is my first $10K month Of course it is more important to improve general trading statistics and keep learning.
How did you feel with your first +$1000 day in trading profits? It happened in my freshman year of college. I thought I had closed the position and went to my morning classes. I came back home around lunch...called my broker about another trade and discovered I had not closed the morning trade...that was now a profit $1500. Closed the position and went to my biochem class...I thought I was the man. Made a pass at a hot girl sitting next to me. She told me to get lost but I didn't give up....invited her to a keg party I was having a few days later. Great party with my roommates and friends. Uninvited people (frat guys) showed up, tried to throw them out...a mass brawl started. Damage to the house about $2000.
I hope I don't sound churlish and critical - that isn't my intention, here. Since seeing your thread started off, yesterday, I've been trying to find a way to say what follows without sounding churlish and critical, but I never know whether I can manage that, so I'll apologise in advance in case I come across badly ... ... but (there had to be a "but" after that, didn't there? ) I think you're asking a "bad question", really, because your question itself (and your added comment quoted above) are both coming from a place of looking at trading in terms of profit maximisation, in terms of "how much you can make", and IMO that's a really bad and typically counterproductive place to come from. A really good place to come from is an orientation of risk management. "How did you feel with your first week without a losing day?" is a good question. "How did you feel with your first month/quarter/year with no peak-to-trough drawdown higher than 7.5%?" is a very good question. "How did you feel when you were first able to collate and analyse the results of 300 consecutive trades without making an overall loss and without having any drawdown higher than 7.5%?" is a really great question. It is ... both in general, as a practical reality, and specifically because it helps you to "come from the right place" and look at trading-related considerations in terms of managing risk rather than in terms of maximizing profits. There are two distinct and radically different consensuses of opinion, on this subject: if you take the consensus of opinion among the huge group of "traders in general", the orientation will always be the one you've displayed above, an orientation of profit-maximisation; if you take the consensus of opinion among the very tiny group of long-term successful traders who are making a living from their trading, the orientation is a very different one, of risk-management, instead. Of course, because the former group is probably 100 times the size of the latter group, the first one is the one you normally see being expressed and discussed. And now, to answer your question: I don't remember my first $1,000+ day. I don't even remember when it was. But I remember very clearly when I first had 300 consecutive trades recorded and studied without any overall loss and with their highest peak-to-trough drawdown being only 4%, because that was the day I knew I could make a full-time living by trading. I've said enough.
Your comments are always welcome. Xela. I agree with you, I suppose profit maximization is a characteristic of beginners like me.