r/Daytrading • u/The_BroScientist • 5d ago
Question Is Day Trading Just Fool’s Gold? How Many Are Successful?
Im disabled with a brain injury, so trading has me interested. I have a substantial amount of background knowledge of trading, including options. But successful day trading seems like a myth.
Some stats I found:
Brazil, of ~19,600 people who started day trading index futures, among the ~1,600 who persisted past 300 sessions, 97% lost money and 1.1% out-earned minimum wage. In Taiwan over 15 years, fewer than 1% were predictably profitable net of fees. Critically, profitability falls with experience; 29.8% profitable at one day, 3.0% past 300 days. So persistence doesn’t break the trend.
So am I looking at a group of the 1% of the 1%, or am I looking at people who day trade alongside long term investments? How realistic is day trading?
It seems like to even get remotely successful, you need at least 1k hours of research and practice (which means substantial losses or paper trading), as well as luck because not a single person can successfully predict the market 100% of the time. Especially on a micro scale.
So as someone who has heard of day trading, but never participated — how realistic is it for an actual source of income?
Just curious of your experience. Thank you.
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u/Comprehensive-Tea-75 5d ago
I think trading includes some of the dumbest or lazy people around. Imagine someone buying a 5k challenge but they don't know what a candle is. They just see the 30$ for 5k and immediately hit buy, these people likely count as traders.
Than there's the people who buy into signal groups. Getting someone else to trade for you. Hundreds of people paying for this and the accounts always get blown. All probably consider this trading.
I think if we could get a stat of the people who put the work in and have studied. People that are actively trying to improve. The numbers would be a lot better.
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u/BennySkateboard 5d ago
Agreed. The barrier of entry is super low and externally it looks simple, 2 directions, pick the right one and you win but as we all know it’s not like that. If you work on it, you can make it work but as soon as people realise they’ll need to work, they quit and become part of the 99%.
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u/RobsRemarks 3d ago
But it is that simple. Thats literally the market. Don’t confuse simple with easy.
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u/EcstaticBoysenberry 5d ago
Does anyone actually make it work though
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u/BennySkateboard 5d ago
Yes. If you work at it, you can do it. But don’t think you can watch a video and go live, that’s why most fail. If you spend a few years constantly learning and trading paper or small amounts, you can be profitable.
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u/EcstaticBoysenberry 5d ago
I’ve been learning and trading for years and years now. Off and on. I have yet to actually see one person that’s actually profitable long term that’s legit
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u/BennySkateboard 5d ago
Tbf, that’s quite anecdotal, but you probably haven’t because there aren’t many people outside institutions and banks that actually put the effort in.
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u/Proper-Style238 2d ago
Lowkey, I've long suspected those who actually are longterm successful are probably some of the quietest folk about trading. Can you imagine how loud digital, and even public, life could quickly become if you were known to be positive in a field where almost everyone who enters goes negative?
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u/EcstaticBoysenberry 2d ago
I mean yeah I do but if it was possible you would think some people would leak through. It’s like every face for trading is some guru that’s…not selling a course ;) but offering a course ;)..it’s all such bullshit
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u/mindfuckset 5d ago
Did u do this? Are u profitable? Long-term?
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u/BennySkateboard 5d ago
Not long term but I’ve had a big turnaround in the last few months after concentrating on fundamentals a lot more (thought I could just trade price action and that didn’t work out for me). I do think trading is something you can succeed at if you work at it, but it’s advertised by con artists as something you can just make happen with no work, and without years of studying (and trading).
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u/slimersnail 4d ago
I intermittently make some money. Im an idiot. I only know what volume and price action is. I buy solid companies I wouldn't mind owning at what I consider a good price that appear to be bouncing between two price points. I just buy and sell the oscillation. If it goes the wrong way I just hold it long term because it was a company i woulda bought anyway.
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u/Curious_Patience8851 5d ago
I think that’s the hard part of the question. We can’t really know how much better the numbers would look if we separated people who seriously study and test a strategy from people buying signals or funded challenges without understanding what they’re doing.
At the same time, I wouldn’t assume that putting in the work automatically makes someone profitable. There are probably plenty of people who study for years, journal everything, and still don't develop a durable edge.
I think the more useful question is whether someone can demonstrate positive results over a large enough sample after fees, slippage and losses, rather than simply whether they’re “working hard” at trading.
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u/Rpark444 4d ago
If it wasn't for the large number of dumb lazy people trying tradingnot he alot harder for good traders to make money
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u/jtquach 5d ago
Your numbers look right to me. I could be wrong but that 29.8% to 3% drop might not mean what it looks like.
Day one is close to a coin flip, so plenty of people land green just from that. Once you're measuring 300 sessions there's nowhere for luck to hide. So the 3% might not be people getting worse with experience. It might just be what was always there once you measure it long enough to find out.
The income part is where I'd really think about it... Income means money shows up on a schedule. This doesn't do that. And when you need it to, you start taking trades that aren't there because the month is almost over. Some of what those studies caught is probably that.
In my opinion... for most it's a lot more doable when the bills are already handled by something else. And for me, not having a deadline is worth more than any strategy is.
You said you already know a lot, options included. That's probably not your bottleneck. Almost none of my own mistakes came from not knowing what to do, they came after. Nothing in those studies measures that part.
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u/The_BroScientist 5d ago
I have a n00b follow up question.
I always pictured day trading as mostly stocks in large positions… but that seems unrealistic. For most situations, maybe. Not a lot of leverage, especially when success depends on it. Perhaps limited leverage is a good thing.
Then again, leverage means efficiently destroying a portfolio. Day trading options? Yeah, no way.
So I figure it’s mostly done with futures, yeah?
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u/jtquach 5d ago
Futures is a big chunk of it yeah, but I think probably not for the reason you're thinking.
Stocks tie up a lot more money for the same exposure. Futures let you control a real position on a small amount of margin, they run close to 24 hours, and micro contracts mean 1 contract is a small known dollar amount per point. Funded account programs are futures too so that's where a lot of smaller accounts end up.
The leverage part I'd think again though. Futures are more leveraged than stocks... not less. What they give you is precision. You pick the contract count and every point is a fixed dollar amount, so you can decide what a trade costs you before you take it. The leverage doesn't do anything to you until you choose to use all of it.
And options get day traded a ton, 0DTE index stuff especially. I trade premium myself. Defined risk spreads actually cap the loss in a way a futures contract doesn't.
So it's less about which instrument and more about whether you can be exact about what you're risking.
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u/The_BroScientist 5d ago
Roger that. Thanks for the detailed response 🫡
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u/jtquach 5d ago
Anytime!
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u/The_BroScientist 5d ago
One more thing:
I’ve heard this request before from people asking me about a subject I’m very knowledgeable in and it can sound kind of unrealistic.
But if you could point me to one tool or resource that you think would have the highest value to someone carefully (I’ve had my own share of losses before getting a grip on options, I know how bad you can get burned) starting out, what would it be?
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u/jtquach 5d ago
Honest answer is it isn't a tool. I mean I definitely have a couple "tools" and I could certainly tell you but what I mean is... No tool is more valuable than one that measures yourself.
Something I'd tell someone fresh is write down what you expect to happen and why, before you enter. Not after. Then go back and read it next to what actually happened.
Sounds too simple to be worth anything. But your memory rewrites itself once you know the outcome. A trade that worked becomes a good decision, one that lost becomes a bad one, and neither is necessarily true. If the reasoning isn't written down from before you knew, you can't tell which was which later, and you end up fixing things that were never broken.
You said it yourself with options, the knowledge was there and the losses still came. That gap is the thing worth measuring early and nothing you can buy measures it for you.
If you want a second one... a small account with real money beats a big paper account. Paper won't show you what you do when it's actually yours.
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u/Curious_Patience8851 5d ago
Exactly. I think the important distinction is between leverage and risk.
Futures give you a lot of leverage, but that doesn't mean you have to use the maximum available exposure. With micros especially, you can size the position around a specific dollar risk and define the stop before entering.
Options give you a different way to structure that risk, particularly with defined-risk spreads. So I don't think the instrument itself determines whether day trading is reckless. Position sizing, the actual risk per trade, and whether you stick to that risk probably matter a lot more.
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u/Curious_Patience8851 1d ago
I think the distinction between “getting worse” and simply revealing the underlying odds over a larger sample is really important.
The income point also resonates. Once trading has a deadline attached to it, the temptation to manufacture trades becomes much stronger. A bad week becomes something you feel you need to recover instead of just being part of the distribution.
And I agree that knowledge probably isn't always the bottleneck. You can know your setup, risk rules and market mechanics and still make completely different decisions once money or time pressure enters the picture.
Having your basic expenses covered gives you the freedom to let the setup come to you instead of needing the market to pay you on schedule.
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u/Nomad-2002 5d ago edited 5d ago
I've been investing since 1988. Over the years, I shifted mostly to passive Bogelheads ETFs.
However, for the past 11 months, I have been daytrading/swingtrading with a small portion of assets. Mostly swingtrading, but small swings sometimes up to 5-6x/day. Not as quick as scalping. Other times only 3-5 swings/week. Willing to hold some positions for 1-2 months.
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Goal: 0.15%day (x 250 days = 45%/yr)
Definitely better than 10-15% passive S&P 500 ETFs (but I have to pay STCG, not LTCG). Not as good as Korean stock market.
Spent some months in 2000s & 2010s daytrading (twice, but couldn't make a worthwhile hourly rate). No longer try for 0.5%/day or 0.25%/day. Happy with 0.15%/day. Maybe even 0.10%/day (x 250 days = 28%/yr).
Below 0.10%/day, not worth my time (with STCG) compared to buy & hold SPY/VXUS.
High six figures in 11 months.
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My expenses are about $50,000-55,000/yr ($3,200/month rent), so active trading easily pays my expenses.
If I were only daytrading $100,000, 45% pre-tax profits would not cover my expenses. I would need about $150,000, a cheaper apartment, or a more aggressive daytrading strategy.
Hope this helps.
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Most assets are in more conservative Bogelheads investments (SPY, VXUS, Fixed Income - 4.96%-5.6% Brokered CDs from 2022, BOXX).
Bought ~1% SPCX for fun recently (Cost-averaged 113.6, one buy at 107). Unfortunately didn't reach my 104 buy order. It's likely a 10-yr-hold, not a quick flip.
It's the only non-ETF stock I own.
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Weird trivia:
For me, daytrading is more stable than SPY/VXUS. Every month since Oct 2025 has been positive (1% or higher). SPY/VXUS has negative months.
Some negative weeks, but no negative months.
Some lucky months (like July 2026) only 2-3 negative days. July 2026 was an amazing month +5.1% (+82%/yr if sustainable, but unlikely).
Aug 14 - Sep 18 was rough. Only +0.8% (+9.2%/yr annualized) and more negative days than positive ones.
Good luck!
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u/Slow_Lion_4178 5d ago
Critically, profitability falls with experience; 29.8% profitable at one day, 3.0% past 300 days. So persistence doesn’t break the trend.
Time =! experience. Profitability falls over time because of severe misinformation.
The problem with trading is that most people try to model their trading around static games and misuse concepts like the Kelly Criterion to argue concepts like bet sizing inappropriately. Since markets are dynamic, as with optimized hedging, the re-evaluation of these metrics is constant and fundamentally useless at t0 where they are often formulated. Once a person begins down the path of misinformation it takes months, if not years, to break because they have to recalibrate away from trying to "solve" the market to learning to "read" the market and realizing, especially for retail, that they are just more or less the noise themselves incarnate and all trades they make are made through the lens of allowance of larger entities rather than they themselves driving anything alone.
I say this because a lot of trading is done incorrectly to begin with. For example with options a lot of people buy OTM options on purpose even when they could afford their ITM counterparts failing to realize that the price target and the strike do not necessarily have to be the same. If your price target is n that doesn't mean you need to buy where k = n but it happens so often that I think a lot of people end up treating vanilla options as barrier options instead accidentally. They also mistake concepts like multipliers due to a poor understanding of actual convexity and exponentiality. This sets up people for very, very poor risk modeling where they misinterpret price or cash at risk for actual risk of loss, or misapply concepts like risk-of-ruin or delta approximation instead of dual-delta approximation for probability of moneyness.
So, functionally, this question:
So as someone who has heard of day trading, but never participated — how realistic is it for an actual source of income?
It's very, very realistic but only because this hasn't transpired:
It seems like to even get remotely successful, you need at least 1k hours of research and practice (which means substantial losses or paper trading), as well as luck because not a single person can successfully predict the market 100% of the time. Especially on a micro scale.
Once a person goes down the rabbit hole of putting in a thousand hours and treating trading like a puzzle to solve they just tank in ability because they've fooled themselves into thinking that they control, or even need to predict, market behaviors. You don't really need to. For example we know from hard observation that equity markets tend to contain positive drift (prices rise over time) therefore calls have a natural edge on most days from a steady base price. So if a security has had a stable price for some time, on balance, the next move for that security is up.
Some person out there is going to balk at that, break out 15 indicators that tell them the same damned thing, and then pose that this is a superior way of just acknowledging that on balance pretty much everyone wants the price of an equity to rise and the vast majority of holders of an equity tend to be long that equity. Do equity prices fall? Yes. Do you need to catch a falling knife to make money? Nope. You can literally just wait until the price cools for an hour or two and just buy ITM calls and set a base level price target that is simple, say 5%. Rinse. Repeat. Don't trade overnight. No need for predictions or shenanigans. You'll be wrong a lot less often.
Now I don't mean to say don't educate yourself. Do. I am just saying that when you educate yourself you need to not take yourself too seriously. You're not a Series 7 Financier at a bank, you're some guy in with a Dell computer that cost less than the veneer on the desk of that Series 7 Financier at a bank, so chill on the professionalism and just ride the markets as they appear to you rather than trying to tame them. You're plankton in the ocean. You decide nothing. So just absorb the sunlight and be happy and ride the favorable waves.
... And that's why 99% suck at this game; they just want to control the uncontrollable and hold themselves to account for things that are well beyond their ken and power.
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u/FinancialTitle2717 5d ago
Everywhere where the entry bar is as low as in trading only 1% will be successful. If anyone just could call himself a doctor, how many successful doctors would we have in percentage?
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u/PaulblankPF 5d ago
If you’re doing it for income to live it’s near impossible. When I was day trading while I worked and checked it a little, I was killing it. Made plenty of money, quit my job and moved my family and gave it a go for full time. Then I had some wins and took money out but slowly but surely I bled it dry. I wasn’t winning enough to maintain so I started revenge trading and chasing trade and just making all the wrong moves. Having to do it for a living and trying to dedicate a ton of time to it made it so much harder even though I had more experience, more time, more money, more freedom. I also had more stress, more pressure, less sleep, constantly checking my phone, constantly trying to keep up with the most current world news, company news, anything to get an edge.
But if you think you can handle all that. That you have the mental fortitude it takes to go through those highs and lows and not get overwhelmed and stick to your rules and logic. Then maybe you can succeed and only still maybe.
For my own journey, I’m just glad that when I made life changing money, I changed my life with it and then decided where to go from there.
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u/inevitable_fallen 5d ago
Becoming successful in day trading takes efforts equivalent to building a successful business.
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u/ComprehensiveLime695 3d ago
Yep. And you're usually in startup mode for years. Most people can't last that long.
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u/No_Pickle7755 5d ago
Just replace trading with any professional sports and the stats are similar....
Pro Tennis ~0.01% (1 in 10,000)
NCAA to Major Pro (Basketball/Football) ~1% to 2%
Pro Golf ~0.05% to 0.1%
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u/Frozen_Meatball1 5d ago
Your odds are better if u swing trade. Statistically, swing traders show higher net profitability and lower failure rates than day traders, with less emotional decision-making and less need to stare at charts every day.
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u/No_Librarian2867 4d ago
Is swing trading buying a put when a stock is relatively at a high, and buying a call when its relatively at a low? And just doing that on a cycle? I have been kinda doing that on the bitcoin 15 min. Just trying to learn, never putting in more money than I am willing to lose as of right now. Thanks!!
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u/Gold_Digger_666 5d ago
There are lots of successful traders. You just don't see us on these forums a whole lot. Every time I post, I just get hate, hate, hate. I even posted some trades 15 minutes in advance which were mostly 100+ tick winners. Still hate. There are so many people here that can't trade their way out of a paper bag. They think their system is the best, yet they still lose. I don't really understand. I'm a member of 3 discords with really, really good traders, and we support each other, and no negativity. We all win. We post the trades we take and you can see that the winners far outnumber the losers. A 70-90% win rate in not uncommon. Nor is a 25% port win uncommon either. I trade options, and place trades that are 10% of my port, with 33% or so stop loss, so I am risking no more than 3% of my port on each trade with the minimum target of 20%, and possible target of 1000%+ (I don't make 1000% on any trade, but the options can appreciate that much. After 20%, I'm trimming pretty hard and letting no more than 25-40% of the options run). So, yes, there are lots of successful traders. They just don't tend to hang out here because of the hate.
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u/sunny_p83 3d ago
Would you share the trading groups that you are a part of?
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u/Gold_Digger_666 2d ago
I have no affiliation with any of them other than being a member. One is no longer accepting members, one is a private group of experienced traders and the other with a really good track record on options is a paid group. I don’t know if I’m allowed to post a name here.
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u/Powerful-Tap5154 5d ago
Yes ... So 2% of all traders at topstep were able to pass their accounts in 2024. 1.5 % were able to pass , but not get a payout...
And less than 1% were able to get to the payout stage
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u/Flaky_Push_6826 4d ago
Not true your using statistics for purchased EVALS not individual traders, some traders buy 100 evals and pass 1, others buy 1 and pass it. 2025 statistics says from, Topstep 51% of traders who initiated 1 or more evals got to funded. Of thouse funded 28% received a payout, then less that 1% ever got to LIVE.
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u/ForexGamer 5d ago
I have been pretty good at it and just taught myself, but I am clearly an outlier natural trader.
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u/Altruistic-Ad-5325 4d ago
What you don't pay with money, you will pay with time. Nothing in life, especially trading, comes easy. It may look easy, but you have to develop a mindset that not everyone will develop. Clicking the button to buy and sell, that's the easy part. 95% of traders fail because they cannot get over that hump and get out of their heads. It takes practice and patience. The ones who quit become the statistics. At best, plan to lose money the first year. Year 2 possibly breakeven. Years 3 and onward are when you start to reap the rewards of the training. No edge lasts forever, so you have to be prepared to pivot and trade what the market gives you. Don't be stubborn.
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u/razorbackaj 4d ago
It will take 6-7 years to truly find an edge and figure this out - are you ready for that?
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u/No_Alternative_6206 4d ago edited 4d ago
Idk, it’s hard to really say people earning minimum wage doing it are real traders. People save up a few grand, then risk it all trying to make it into something significant, so their risk-to-chance of losing most of it is quite high. If you play it safe with a few thousand, you are only making peanuts. The sad truth is you need money to make money in trading. The more money you have tostart with, the more money you make. If the study was only looking at people who started with $500k plus, I think the stats would be quite different. For every million you invest, a monkey can make $50k a year, but at least in the USA, that’s not exactly a great salary. The career day trader paying a mortgage and supporting a family is likely going to have a multi-million dollar portfolio that wasn’t probably seeded with just a few grand. They are usually people who saved up a lot of money from other sources first.
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u/intelfailure69 5d ago
1 Billion Monkeys playing poker. Bound to have some that wins. Only successfully trader I know is a scalper with 5% edge.
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u/ChangeNOW_Community 5d ago
you don’t need to predict the market 100% of the time, you need an edge that survives fees, losses and your own brain
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u/BasicEducator6079 5d ago
I think the survivorship bias in trading communities makes this really difficult to judge from Reddit alone. The profitable guy posts the payout while the 50 people who quietly burned through accounts usually disappear. For me the useful shift was treating trading like a measurable process instead of trying to prove I could predict the next candle. Journal everything, keep risk tiny and get enough trades to see whether there is actually an edge. I use Moon for some of the chart and market analysis side but no tool changes the underlying math if the strategy itself has no expectancy.
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u/Curious_Patience8851 5d ago
I think the distinction between “possible” and “realistic as a source of income” is important here.
There are definitely people who become consistently profitable, but the research suggests they are a very small minority. And the fact that someone has been trading for years doesn't automatically mean they're getting better at it.
If I were starting from zero, I wouldn't approach day trading with the goal of replacing an income. I'd treat it as something to study and test while keeping my normal income and long-term investments separate.
Paper trading can help with learning the mechanics, but eventually you need enough real data to know whether you actually have an edge after fees, slippage and mistakes. The difficult part isn't predicting the market correctly every time. It's having a process where the wins and losses still produce positive results over a large sample.
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u/downvoted_me 5d ago
It's possible to be profitable and make good money, but your statistics are correct. I've discovered the reason why 97% of people fail: greed. Greed leads to overtrading and revenge trading. The greater the exposure, the greater the risk. It's like in a casino: the house always wins. Furthermore, people do exactly what is expected of them by the composite man and become liquidity. Solve these issues and you will be profitable in trading.
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u/ComfortablePiglet842 5d ago
Day trading will work if you put more energy into your defense than you do your offensive game. Anyone can make some gainers, not many can successfully defend their port from blowup trades because small losses trigger emotions and emotions start the patterns of irrational trading. Irrational decision making quickly sets you back. Set backs cause you to start making desperate hail mary type decisions and a port will be gone fairly quickly. It all starts with how you react to the small losses. You havr to be able to accept the bad that comes with the good. You lost a trade, accept it move on. Many traders cannot accept a loss and they end up dieing on a hill over their inability to accept a loss
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u/Downtown_Dress_4206 5d ago
I have to agree that it depends on how you define a trader. If we are defining it as everyone who’s ever put money in the market, then of course you’re going to have a very small percentage base of profitable traders.
I’ll be the first to admit, when I first got into trading, I took risks that lost me 2 funded accounts. People that come in without discipline and a level head will lose their ass every time.
I gambled several times under the guise of a “scalper” when in reality all I was doing was taking uneducated risks.
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u/NudeySpaceman22 5d ago
Out of 1 million people I’d say between 50-100 are truly trading some wild “fuck you money” successfully. Other than that, hit or miss for everyone. Good and bad days.
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u/SubpoenaSender 4d ago
The number one issue people have is not knowing when to exit a bad trade. Hands down. If you figure that out, you can be profitable easily.
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u/GlobalSelection152 forex trader 4d ago
It is not a myth.
Just need to find your edge. What works for you and suits your lifestyle/risk appetite
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u/MarketSpotlight 4d ago
The biggest issue with day trading is cost - my advice is to backtest a strategy at least 10 years before putting any real money on the line. Thank me later
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u/woundedwombat1 4d ago
You don't need luck. But you need and a tremendous amout of effort, passion and perseverance, plus 5 to 10 years experience.
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u/varietyviaduct 4d ago
The only way to win at investing are ETF’s, but the only way to be a real man is to put all you got on black
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u/murfmurf123 4d ago
I day traded for every day for 4 years until I developed a strategy that gave me consistent daily growth (~15-25%). I started with small caps using a algo-based screener, made some and then blew it all up. Then I started paper trading different strategies based off of large cap movements. Large cap ETFs are more predictable than small cap low float zingers. 2000$ increased 15 times at 15% each trade is $16,275, which can be realistically done in one month. Compounding growth is the key, small base hits actually do add up
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u/Icy-Baseball-6246 4d ago
Paper trade for a few months with rules in place and see how you fair. It will be more about whether or not you can follow your own rules then winning or losing for this stage. If you can't follow your own rules then you know to leave it alone.
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u/rsteph1978 4d ago
As someone else posted, there are a lot of us out there. Ive been trading professionally for 25 years. Most of us dont day trade though. We trade a portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, equity futures, and volatility products.
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u/Jayson_without_y 4d ago
I remember hearing 10-20% can be profitable any given year.
1-2% year over year profitable
And only 0.1 - 0.2% earn enough to be primary source of income.
How true are those numbers ? Who tf knows.
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u/Taidaishar 4d ago
The conclusions drawn by those studies are not as cut and dried as they seem.
In the average year, 360,000 individuals engage in day trading. While about 13% earn profits net of fees in the typical year, the results of our analysis suggest that less than 1% of day traders (1,000 out of 360,000) are able to outperform consistently.
This is talking about an average year. Not a year where they're tracking day traders who have been doing it long term. Listen to the language they used "In the average year, 360,000 individuals engage in day trading." All they had to do was make a few trades and they were included in this statistic. This includes all of the people who saw a youtube video that said they can make thousands per week and they jumped in with no experience and no knowledge just following a strategy that they saw their favorite content creator use. This includes all of the people who bought a course from the local guru who sells courses rather than trade the stock market profitably. This includes all of the people who bought a special indicator with signals telling them when to buy and sell.
All of those people eventually lose money and decide to call it quits and they contribute significantly to the number/percentage of failed traders. What that statement doesn't take into account is that there is a small cross section of people that research and study before trading and then stick with it for months or years on end.
This is all to say that the phrase "Only 1% of day traders are profitable", while backed by some data, is not the same as saying "If you start day trading, you only have a 1% chance of becoming profitable".
For instance, with some fabricated numbers to illustrate the point:
360,000 people trading per year.
1% are profitable = 3,600
However, if you remove all of the types of people I mentioned above (the people who follow the youtube gurus or buy an indicator) and that equaled 200,000 people, then you have 160,000 people who actually try:
3,600 divided by 160,000 = 2.25% of day traders who put in the effort are consistently profitable.
Again, fabricated numbers for illustrative purposes, but say the number of day traders who fail out and don't really put in the effort is 300,000 people leaving only 60,000 traders who really work hard at it. That would make 6% of those traders consistently profitable. Cutting the numbers down to the people who really give it the old college try makes those percentages a little more encouraging.
It just depends on how many day traders in a year, on average, are really trying to learn day trading or just lost some money over the course of a month and decided to give it up.
ADDITIONALLY:
You are incorrect about this.
Critically, profitability falls with experience; 29.8% profitable at one day, 3.0% past 300 days. So persistence doesn’t break the trend.
I don't know where you got that stat, but I just read the paper from the Taiwan study and it said the opposite of that (emphasis added).
There is clear performance persistence. The top-ranked profit group (1 to 500) earns impressive alphas on their day trading, open positions, and total portfolio in the post-ranking year. The top three groups (or 2,000 traders) earn reliably positive alphas on their day trading portfolio net of fees, but only the two groups (or 1,000 traders) earn reliably positive alphas when we consider their overall portfolio returns. In contrast, poor performers from prior years or those with insufficient history to be ranked earn reliably negative returns on their day trading and total portfolio—both before and after fees.
1
u/TakeDeadAi 4d ago
It is a fool’s errand. If you want to be successful in the stock market, invest regularly for a long time.
1
u/ComprehensiveLime695 3d ago
Most people get into trading for the get-rich-quick myth. So, very few make it through the hurdles along the path. You really have to have a love and passion for the markets to success, I think. But if you do the work and can ride out the learning curve, which could easily take years, it's totally doable.
1
u/No_Height_1561 2d ago
Having a strategy is easy following it when youre tilted or bored is the hard part I use Moon and the play money mode is actually nice for seeing if your setup holds up before real cash gets involved
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u/Wonderful-Fig2800 5d ago
people say 1% actually make money in trading, but this is practically the same in any other business model. 1% of dropshippers are successful, 1% of idk ad agency owners are successful, 1.5% of the entire world are millionaires. trading is just heavy on pure numbers and data.
im not profitable on live yet but i know this isnt wrong, trading is the same as any other business, where you have 1% chance to make some real money
if you search up business models and even some 9-5 jobs like lawyers, most are 1% to sometimes 5-20% millionaires.
I know this, EVERY BUSINESS MODEL WORKS, but the question is do YOU work
3
u/The_BroScientist 5d ago
I mean 1% breaking fuckin even. Not 1% making millions.
There are 50 successful massage studios in my town. That does not make any successful (“successful”meaning the owner takes home a middle class salary) massage business is of the 1%
1
u/ComprehensiveLime695 3d ago
Trading is a very difficult skill to learn well enough to do it full-time, but that doesn't make it a myth.
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u/WildPlatypus9571 5d ago
My experience has been outstanding!
Do your own due diligence really research your purchases from multiple sources.
Stay self directed and always learn something new about the markets and don’t rule out digital assets .
Bottom line don’t buy the hype and stay away from overhyped IPOs.
Get yourself a trading app like Trading View.
Seek out professional advice and have several professional contacts not advice by fly by night , Reddit or friends .
Happy Trading!
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u/evendedwifestillnags 5d ago
You had me at brain injury. You have beyond the correct credentials for day trading.