why do people believe day trading will get them rich quick? hope this thread will help newbies and amateur ask themselves if they really want to trade.
Trading is the same across all timeframes. It can make you rich as your rate of return based on risk will be quicker. This is assuming your risk is constant across all timeframes AND most importantly you have an edge. Basically what you just asked is, why don't HFTs swing trade their money? Pretty ignorant
People believe this because sometimes it happens.....a guy down the hall from me was making 60k a year, made a few good stock picks, and now he's a millionaire and drives a F360 to work everyday.
same scheme like with real estate flippers. it can make you rich,but it's also can make you poor very quickly. it's can make you rich and can make you feel that you are king of trading in today's environment. it's like 2000 all over again.just buy whatever and sell later at higher price. IWM 3 months chart. prety much every week is up http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/ch...MBOL_CHOSEN&nosettings=1&rand=2347&mocktick=1
It has been done and it can be done. A human can run a sub four minute mile. Before this was achieved, some believed it could not be done, but one man ignored this and just did it. It is possible to make millions starting from thousands (to reference cheese, I'm not talking about making withdrawals to "jack away on living"). Stratification is the natural order of things. In every competitive field, there are those who redefine the limits of what is considered possible. Almost every competitive field presents the opportunity for the truly excellent to become wealthy in addition to expert in their field. The goal, however, is excellence in the field itself. Money is simply a measurement of performance. An excellent trader will become a rich trader. If an excellent trader is not already rich, he may choose to make himself rich through trading. In instruments such as futures, high leverage and frequent opportunities enable staggering returns to be generated until liquidity becomes an issue (at which point the rate of return slows, but does not interfere with becoming rich). There is an order to all of this. The markets will allow a method to be applied to them for the extraction of consistent profits. There are day traders who have gone years without a losing day in futures. Fact. That the markets facilitate this opportunity is not the issue of concern here. The issue you refer to is that the masses have unjustified expectations of success. The majority who attempt trading do not have the ability to be the best at anything, let alone highly successful. Many aspire, few succeed. Therefore, survival of the fittest. We could discuss this endlessly, but the fact is that certain interests are served by the unending inflow of guessers and gamblers. Coupled with what might be called "human nature", but more accurately abdication of personal responsibility and a herd mentality, we find ourselves discussing those who are condemned to be unsuitable for this profession. They will not thank you for making any attempts to dissuade them. Any astute operator will understand the reasons for this. Why does the individual aspirant believe they will make themselves rich quickly? The more incapable they are, the more strongly they believe this. We know why. "Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it annoys the pig."
What is annoying is not whether or not you can get rich quickly daytrading (it happens a lot, and then they mostly go back to poor even faster). What is annoying is the everyday person who walks in off the street and thinks they can just come into our arena and blow us all out of the water. Annoying but also absolutely necessary chum for the water. I'm not a huge fan of daytrading because outside of HFT/Market making/Arb, you need volatility and liquidity to make it work and make it scalable. Sometimes these conditions are present, sometimes they are not. You constantly have to be moving instruments and markets and looking for the liquid and emotional instruments where you can make your money. Maybe I'm just getting older, and I tire of having to stare a screen for hours, tired of tight margins and having to worry constantly about execution costs. I like swing trading and position trading a heck of a lot more. To each their own though, daytaders have it the toughest and have the hardest grind and thus are some interesting characters.