Those guys lost alot of money for a long time before they became good traders. Many of them were wiped out several times. They also traded 100 of millions to billions of dollars. Most started out in salaried positions, so they had the time to get good w/o leaving for another career. It takes a long time to learn how to get in and out 100,000 or 1,000,000 share positions. You're moving the market. The avg day trader doesn't move the market, but jumps on for the ride. Most of the questions here relate to day trading as we know it, in and out all day long.
Then there's really no way to answer the question. You might spend six months in some program that turns out to be a complete waste of time and is six months lost. Or you might find something that is exactly right and accelerates your learning curve in a way that you could never do on your own. If you're interested in how long it takes to profit, you may want to look at which avenue is most likely to lead to profit sooner rather than lumping everything together. Otherwise, you're going to get answers from six months to never and may be no closer to the answer you're looking for. --Db
this is highly subjective. If youre comfortable being a fast learner, and the markets (stock trading method of choice) agrees with you, and there's favorable trading trends, then its fairly short period of time, and some have done this within 2 months (i.e. become profitable). Market conditions or even sub-sector market conditions prevail over whatever dispoition that you might have. You can be all the trained you want to be, and the markets are being roiled due to economic or fundamental news (oil price hikes, war in the Gulf, Election Upset/Fraud, etc.) and just about no matter what you do, it doesn't change the outcome. Disposition and attitude are what the Master Traders speak about, and live by. Knowledge is fundamental, so learn all that you can, and supplement that with text book learning on your own. Read the WSJ daily or the NY Times, LA Times, WashingtonPost, or whatever major business newspaper is availalbe locally. You can never really know enough.
i can't even imagine making that much money a day on average. knowing what you know now, what were you doing wrong before? what turned you around? congratulations, btw
ADXTrader, to summarise, I think we can specifically state that the time required is between one month and five years.
I think those who can make it in less than half year are either genius or extremely lucky. As someone said, everyone is a genius in the bull market. For an average man like me, I think 2 years is the minimum.
I think 6 months is a reasonable target time to become profitable. If you are trading your own money and have half a brain, you should understand that there is a learning curve and trade accordingly. In other words start out trading only 100 or 200 shares. Even if you lose a little on most trades due to commission charged or errors in judgement, it is still the smart thing to do. The important thing at first is just to learn what works and what doesn't, develop a strategy. Once your strategy is fine tuned, then you up the shares and go for consistent profits.
On a related note, how much $$$ did it take to become consistently profitable? http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?threadid=10842
It can take 6months or it can take 6years -- nobody will really be able to say... I can say this though, the longer you keep wondering how long, the longer you will usually have to wonder how long...
I like that quote, cause it's really true. Instead concentrating on how long it would take to get profitable, people should concentrate on learning. Cause if the time frame comes w/o you turning postive, it can have a negative mental effect. 6 months is an average, some poeple take a year, others take years.