How many years are necessary to consider yourself a successful trader?

Thanks for the excellent reply and throwing some numbers out as well.

 

I'll also add that people like to make things sound very complex. Sometimes it's done for sinister reasons, like a car mechanic would to a female customer (*). Sometimes it's done because people do not fully understand the idea themselves and it's hard for them to explain it in words. Sometimes it's done because it makes one sound smart.

 

Indeed.

 

Stock market is zero-sum game.

For example, when the index goes from 20000 to 25000, every participant should gain roughly 20% in average during the time.

However frequent traders usually pay lots of money to commission and tax.

In my guess, most successful trader is NOT a frequent player.

 

No, the stock market is not a zero sum game in absolute sense. I am not sure how this particular myth is perpetuated, since it's a bit counterintuitive (*). Neither are the debt or commodity markets. Only derivatives market is. Do you want me to elaborate further on that?

This said, the impact of transaction costs (as well as other frictions) is huge and most people underestimate it. So your guess definitely applies to investors.

(*) There is a classic paper by Sharpe about investing being a zero sum game, but it was talking about relative performance of active investors with respect to the benchmark index. The gist of it is that the sum of asset-weighted performances of all investors (both losers and winners) will equal the overall performance of the market.

 

Are you talking of buy-and-hold investors or (elite) traders? There is not that kind of correlation in performance for most short-term traders that are profitable. My best year in the last 10 has been 2008. Yet we know what the market did then. There are as my strategies as there are traders, and unless you know what those are, you can only speak for yourself on expected profitability.

 

Likewise, I like 2008 market based on personal trading logic.
However thing is NOT in favor of me recently.

Hope both will be happy next few years.

 

Probably I mean same as yours.
Forgive my low proficiency in English.

For example, Poker is quite close to derivative in ZERO-SUM sense.
Stock (equity) market is quite close to real estate market in ZERO-SUM sense.

 

I think you’re going all right

 

frenz i am new to the Day trading world ,
I have found most of day trading community talk about trading Stocks in Play .
For me its been very difficult to find new stocks every day , i loose focus and start doing overtrading .
Is it okay to trade same stock every day for a long period of time like 2-3 months or a year ??

I will be greatful if anyone can help me with that .

Thanks