Hi. Asking for a friend, what is the fastest way for a 30 year old middle school drop out to make a career out of trading? What is the best way? Ideally would like to daytrade index ETFs (IWM,QQQ,SPY) on a 10 minute time frame and bring in a consistent 2-4% monthly.Is this impossible? Any suggestions appreciated. Thanks
You schooling level is not relevant but your ability to learn will be. If you will only trade indexes, I suggest you learn futures instead. https://www.cmegroup.com/education.html Start with paper trading then the smaller Micro contracts when ready.
You've probably already been told that 90% of traders fail. Often its expanded to 90% of traders lose 90% of their money within 90 days. But the message is the same. You have a 1 in 10 chance of not losing your money, far less than that of supporting yourself in a comfortable life-style. So I say go ahead and do it. But it would help your chances of success if you avoid doing 90% of the things that 90% of traders do. Principally, don't start by day-trading. Become consistent trading off daily charts, then use some profits from that to fund a day-trading campaign. Secondly, don't chase reversals. Most new traders look to buy simply because price is at the bottom of the screen and is lower than it was at the left-hand edge. They talk about support and double bottoms and inverse head-and-shoulders and all that but its all the same. The outcome's the same too. When you have a consistent strategy, check it will provide you with a 6% gain per month. This gain means you double your money every year and will therefore provide a decent salary within your life-time. After my words of encouragement, I doubt you wanted to read the rest........ but good luck to you.
%% The is so much truth in your statement; learn to invest. Most investors[SPY........] make money, NOT a prediction
Having been around quite a number of traders - these days of Algo driven order flows I personally think that day trading or scalping is a very low percentage endeavor. Manual scalping with a mouse will certainly enrich your broker and provide liquidity for the bots. Position or swing trading small size for bigger chunks of trading range is a higher percentage play IMO. I wish you good fortune.
yup agree with the aboves... day trading is waste of time. take advantage of the job market... get some basic training.. and even if you just become a tradesman and make $50k.... use a simple savings calculator, $1000 down, $1000 a month, buy QQQ and hold, 12.5% annual return, you million in 20 years.... you retire comfy, or go to Thailand and live like a king. that's how robust this economy is, a middle school drop out plumber can have a path like this in front of you.. check my 'trading is easy' thread... although the savings calculator shows easy, the actual execution is not... you have to either - completely shut yourself out of the 24/7 media bombardment, and just blindly buy $1000 per month; - or if you somehow still want to be somewhat connected to society in the next 20 years then you need to somewhat understand how the market works... 20 years is a long time, very easy to get derailed because the 'pro boys' I mention in my thread will have all the tools to try to derail you.
If I was to do it all over again, skip the scalping which took me a good 14 years to get it down, still have no real clue on day trading, lol, 1-4 runners from scalps make extended profits on normal range days, which we don't have right now. Best would be stay with long term/swinging and learn options like back of your hand in both commodities and stocks. This way you have a life, brokers make less money, less taxes, don't have stacks of reading material in corner wondering if they become a classic cause no time to read them, LOL.
Options are a great way to swing trade with less anxiety. You’re going to minimize the adverse effects of automation and bots and algos when you swing trade. The KEY is to start out with such an absurdly small size that you have no hesitation about letting the position work in the market. When you are day trading “size” it’s just too easy for most traders to get shaken out of a position.
Studies on 68,000 options traders concluded that they lost nearly three fold more than the equity traders. Options are a zero sum game - you have a few winners & a lot of losers. Most traders I see claiming that options contain risk use them like drunken sailors buying lottery tickets, they just blow up a lot faster. The CEO of TDA Ameritrade had commented on how expensive their advertising is to backfill all the option traders that churn through. Your at least 10 times more likely to be successful trading equities & ETFs than trading options outright.