Intraday liquidity restraints are one factor. If you go home flat at the end of each day, you don't have the opportunity to catch trends that last. Even if you are a, say futures trader, who makes 10k-20k per day everyday, that still only puts you at 2.5-5 million a year earnings (which is a lot). And then you'd need to trade for a LONG time to ever reach a billion.
the QQQQ and SPY trade 200 million shares a day. This is enough liquidity to make a billion. I've never done paper trading just like I've never played poker without real money involved. Part of the skillset required in both is controlling your emotions, and there's no way to practice that without real money.
There are lots of billionaire traders that come to mind. Stevie Cohen, James Simons, George Soros..... They are all traders, but not necessarily day traders. Maybe that should tell you something.
based on 250 trading days...4 million a day would be tough. I can't even imagine the size I would have to trade. And I trade some large size.
billionaires or anyone of high net worth say 50 million hire invest in hedge funds who trade for them.
tradersboredom, people play poker with other people's money all the time. Nevada is the only state where it's legal to play with the casino's money and they're called shills. If the Hedge funds are the best traders out there there isn't much hope considering how poorly they've done lately. They're the very people who should've benefited from the volatility. In reality they were only benefiting from the market's upside. I wonder if brokerages are allowed to provide 4X day trading margin to billionaires like they do for the rest of us. If you have a large bankrool, a discount brokerage, and 4X day trading margin it seems to me that even the smallest advantage over the market would make at least 10% a quarter nearly every quarter.
"Why aren't there more billionaire traders?" immediately suggests the followup questions How many billionaire traders are there? How do you know? How many billionaire traders are there, who are completely unknown to you and everyone else?