I'm new here and curious about how many full time daytraders there are out there. Has there been any census taken recently and where is it available? I remember back in the late 90's when it was very popular. I believe I saw it near 250,000. I wonder if that has increased (especially with a lot of people losing their jobs). I'm also curious about how many are in the US vs outside the US, but only trade the US equities markets. Plus I thought this would be a good discussion topic to throw out there. Thanks.
I would think that this statistic would be hard to measure accurately. The labor department would probably register day traders as "unemployed" because they don't have a normal wage slave job.
I think the number is an order of magnitude less than that if you put a limit on the frequency of day trades. Occasional day trades maybe that many, I doubt it though. Frequent day trades, I won't be surprised if the number is less than 20,000.
if we are talking about frequent traders (those of us that stare at our monitors from 8-4, have several monitors, pay for news/quote services, trade through a prop firm etc.)... then I would be surprised if the number wasn't AT LEAST over 100,000.
i'm a newbie, but i would think its in the millions. i mean why else would u see ads for trading accounts on every channel of tv 10 times an hour?? on a side note, what is the number one "live" spectator sport in the world? the answer....
How do you come up with that figure? Anyone know how to do one of those polls on this site? maybe less than 100k...100k-1mm, 1mm-5mm etc.
Let's agree on a classification for daytrading: someone who trades at least 500,000 shares per month and trades 200 or more trading days of the year. Yes, that does rule out some extreme pikers or some really talented intraday swing guys but by and large if you're not doing that volume you're not making a living from this. There is no way there are anywhere close to 100,000 professional day traders. The number is less than 25,000, likely way less. I believe I heard daytraders account for 2% of total exchange volume, which means, out of, say, 8 Billion shares per day, we are responsible for 160,000,000 shares per day. Let's say your average daytrader does 40,000 shares (it should be higher) per day. 4000 guys doing that volume (40,000 shares per day) leaves us with 2% of the volume. Even if we do 5% of the volume (we don't), instead of 2%, and you cut the criteria in half - saying 20,000 shares per day is required - that still leaves us with a max of 20,000 daytraders.
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