Day traders can make tons of money. But, the vast majority can't hang with the pros. What's funny about it is that the guys who don't know how to day trade love to hate successful day traders. Sour grapes. I have never heard nor read about any successful day trader hating on swing traders. Not once. The hate always goes in one direction. Tons of locals and pros in open outcry have traded and trade HUGE SIZE during the day. This is a FACT. There have always been day traders and there always will be. Not all of them lose either. Huge money can be made on short term trading. Some traders do thousands of round trips in a day on globex. Even more than that. It is crazy.
My belief is that retail daytraders 'running Windows on a Comodore 64 PC' so to speak will continue to live on Struggle Street with their dreams on Cloud 9. The highly succesful day traders have equipment/hardware/software/systems/coding that is nigh on unattainable to the average ET lacky.
Absolutely. But, this is because of the level of competition. There is a technological arms race going on in financial markets. People need to understand that the traders going at the full clip size (250 ES contracts) have the best everything. But this doesn't mean that a small trader can't make good money doing the same type of thing. You have to be a one man army so to speak. You have to know what the best guys are doing, and this is the problem. They never talk about it. They make all the employees sign NDA and non-compete to protect 'trade secrets'. In other words, proprietary information. If they don't they will be ruined in courts by legal teams with literally infinite resources.
To be clear I specifically stated that day trading is a waste of time and resources for the money you get. What I did criticize is the conclusion reached by the study based on the flawed analysis of the data. Studies with flawed samples and flawed analysis are often used to make generalized conclusions in all topics and this study is more of the same. I was very clear on both points.
I am working to be the first EliteTrader to be consistently profitable no matter what the stats say! I wrote two systems that I am testing quietly and privatly. Sure could use some help...but not from anybody here. ES
For skilled traders, the problem with "day trading" as a main focus isn't that it's impossible but that it's stupid. Longer holding periods offer dramatically better strategy metrics (as measured by e.g. profit factor or per-trade expectancy) at a small fraction of the overall effort, far less time in the market, far lower commission costs, and with no requirement to operate at 100% peak focus and performance for hours on end. Capacity constraints mean that you won't be able to deploy more than a fraction of your capital in day trading, unless you're just starting out - and if you are just starting out, you won't make money because day trading requires higher skill compared to swing/position trading. This is why you don't see self-described "day traders" in Market Wizards and similar. Almost by definition, those at the top of the field (in trading or any other field) are the ones who make maximally efficient use of scarce resources, which in our case means capital and the trader's time/attention/focus. Day trading does neither.