I believe most people on ET are day traders and I have known this for a long time. I hardly meet anyone with Option trading background who understands options trading and has other trading skills and Technical traders and long term wealth building portfolio investors. Daytrading is the most risky way to make a living. Watching those screen all day can be very stressful and hard. Loss of capital is always a great threat. Therefore SEC wouldnot allow any accounts under $25,000 for daytrading purposes. SEC seems to have quite a disdain for day traders too. Why?
In you example if a trader averaged one tick profit (on the ES, e.g.) per trade, the daily gross profit on 50 cars would be $18,750. $4200 a day in commission. Over $14,000 net is not a bad day.
I have a friend who I know has traded at least 90 cars at one time and he is in and out of trades in seconds.
day day day, we all know you are not a trader. Why you hang around here and post at a multiple of the people who actually do trade is bewildering. My guess? you obviously have no outside interests, have never had a girlfriend, let alone serious relationship, and are a catcher in your current trips to reststops. You must like abuse, why in the fuck else would you post here?The only iron condor you know is when you get doubleteamed by other deranged (males) . Please do us all a great favor, and maybe move out of your parents basement, and do what grown up people do.....get a job! Oh and before you tell everyone for the (wow you have that many fucking posts in less than a year?) unknownth time to do whatever you keep on telling people, I think you are in denial. Didn't your mother mother tell you you will go blind by chronic masturbation? Game, set, match. Oh yeah I amost forgot, why don't you enlighten this community on what exactly you do or have done in this business. What is your cid # so we can verify? My guess? zilch.
I made close to 500k over the last 12 months, and 100k this month alone with no down weeks, and only a handful of down days........... primarily from "daytrading". Meanwhile longer term investors have taken a servere haircut over the past 12 months. Call me a gambler, day laborer, anything you want. This is not an endevor to aquire titles or kudos. It is a method used by many for over 100 years dating back to the days where securities were traded under the buttonwood tree. One of many methods many of us use. Large Specialist firms on the NYSE, "upstairs" trading operations, floor traders, and other Market Makers on various exchanges around the world have built fortunes using short term trading techniques.... primarily by finding an edge and expoiting it. I doubt wall street considers them low men on the totum pole. Only since dot machines and floor memberships available to an exclusive few gave way to highspeed electronic trading (available to everyone with an inernet connection and a few bucks) did we hear nonsense like this. You should do some more homework before speaking with such authority about something you obviously know little about.
Daytraders, and I refer to traders who are flat, holding nothing but cash or equivalents at end of day, regardless of trade style, are THOUGHT TO BE terminators of the flow of money in the given instrument or vehicle. The trade is done, flat, someone has lost money, someone has made money. period. The way the money flow starts again is with fresh trades ideas, maybe different vehicles or instruments, based on different criteria. It doesn't matter if the criteria is dynamic or fundamental, it is different and the trade itself has different expectation and different participants. Case in point... a retired neighbor friend asked me about VZ in October '07. The stock was above $42. I suggested he place a sell stop order (of course he had no clue what that was) at his breakeven price, taking the dividend he has received into the calculation as well. He did not do it. Right now his account value is down 15% from the October high, and has been down over 20% in recent days. If I was a daytrader of stock, which I am not;futures only, he would be pretty upset if I told him thanks to VZ and VZ only, I've been living on the lost value of his account for the last 4 months! In his mind, I would have terminated the money flow of HIS investment. Unfortunately, that attitude or more accurately, lack of knowledge, is de facto for the investing public, and is further ingrained by the media. Gordon Gecko was not a destroyer of companies, he was a liberator of them. Osorico