Your analogies are flawed. The "self directed" trader can not "hurt" anyone else and all he/she risks is the amount in his/her trading account. No one can stop an individual from wasting their own capital and no one should be telling them what's allowed and what's not. If you start going this route (preventing people from wasting their money and what else...) then the next obvious thing would be to ban gambling, lottery and... let's dig deeper... ban smoking (how isn't smoking even bigger risk, financial and health-wise to anybody?)... then start telling them how they are allowed to spend their money and so on and on and on. However, drivers require license because they put at risk other's life and/or property. Same for airline pilots, construction contractors and so on. Institutional traders don't risk their own capital so why comparing them to self-directed traders? So basically speaking, if your own actions can not hurt anyone else, why should you be told what to do and how to do it (that's what the licensing is all about), especially if all you risk is (only) the money. The one obvious exception is one's own health and sanity. For the obvious reasons the law prohibits the individuals to do everything one pleases with their body/health, so to prevent (to a degree) individuals to fatally hurting themselves. But only to a degree, since state will not institutionalize anyone i.e. for being a junkie, alcoholic or cigarette smoker though we know where it leads to.
Although h there is a requirement to stop stupid people losing there money, why pass that on to everyone, who's to decide who will be good or bad at trading. Day trading pattern rule almost definitely stopped me being rich a long time back, didn't actually solve anything or help retail in any way I could see either.
Not true considering the typical retail trader (that fails) is hurting more than just their wallet. Maybe the same qualifications should be required as those institutional traders working for a financial institution ??? Regardless, not a big deal today considering to become a retail trader only requires identification and some paperwork that requires about 20 mins of someone's time to fill out...a fax machine or a few stamps on an envelope. Oddly, I can't remember the name of the sponsor here at ET...they said they do have restrictions in place such as "financial background checks" and he seem to imply they are one of the few to do such. He didn't elaborate what that specifically meant but it sounded like something more than a check of someone's credit.
%% That sounds about 95%, or more than 95%, right,777. Market makers/specialists can do well daytrading. But I NEVER thought the market maker/specialists were the enemy. LOL But our family takes numbers + nicknames real serious; maybe if i can NOT out trade/speed a specialist; i better find out some thing better than picking up pennies. I do pick up a penny if i see it on the ground , but i am talking stock market trends-murray t turtle
What? LOL Day traders do thousands of trades(simulations) and spend thousands of hours studying the market. They have knowledge/experience and the best ones definitely use risk management. There are also swing traders and long term traders that don't use risk management.
When are people going to stop saying it's a game... when you treat it as a game, and say I won x ... you will treat it as a gamble... It's work... you earn money... treat my work with respect!
“The game of speculation,” writes Jesse Livermore at the start of his book, “is the most uniformly fascinating game in the world. But it is not a game for the stupid, the mentally lazy, the man of inferior emotional balance, nor for the get-rich-quick adventurer. They will die poor.”