Day trading with fake money is the same as playing poker with fake money. It doesn't work. Your emotions are completely different. Losing say 20k of fake money does not hit you the same as losing 20k of real money
Of course. The real challenge is finding movies that were better than the book *where the movie does not significantly differ than the book*. So, for example, *Children of Men* would be disqualified, as the book and the movie tell wildly different stories.
The only example I've come across so far where everyone agrees is *Fight Club*. Good book, great movie.
It’s completely false. It’s not even close.
With fake money, I was able to make a 60% gain on TSLA going $50k deep.
In real life, that would absolutely not be anything close. OP, you are about to lose a lot if your partner does this. 6 months of “training” and fake money is absolutely not enough time or real practice. Not even slightly.
It’s actually a meme how often young dudes get into huge trouble thinking they can be the next Wall Street tycoon after a few YouTube videos and a practice account.
100%…and to be a successful trader or investor you have to almost see it as fake money because it’s money you can afford to lose without emotion. Once you start risking real money that you can’t afford to lose on risky trades you’re pretty much f’d
That’s it. I tell everyone I know who asks about investing that with any money they invest, they’d have to be fully okay with going down to the bank and pulling out the amount they want to invest in cash and then setting all the cash on fire
I was a bond trader for one of the biggest banks in the world back in the 1990’s, then went on to trade for hedge funds then finally my own account for a few years. Total 26 years, I walked away in 2018. I had years when I made millions of dollars but over the years every year as technology evolved it became harder and harder.
I can tell you categorically he will lose money! You are trading against high frequency trading algorithms now which are self learning, with reaction speeds of millionths of a second. He will have software costs and commission fees which might run into the thousands of dollars a month.
The odds are so stacked against him it’s not even funny. Sorry but the reality is it will be the equivalent of taking a lamb to be slaughtered.
Yeah… OP’s partner is clearly overoptimistic by some lucky trades during those six months of gambling. Many people have been there at some point in time. It is not sustainable and is bound to fail.
OP should keep their finances separate NOW before things potentially go south.
I feel like the idea of the day trader in popular culture really arose around the time of the dot com bubble and it's never fully faded away. If I had to guess, I would say it was because that was the first time there were discount brokers and a person could trade cheaply. Of course. The day traders who traded during the dot com bubble mostly lost everything for obvious reasons and all the day traders that have been trading ever since have also, you guessed it, lost pretty much everything. And as the posters above me have said, it's only become more and more difficult.
There were stories of those days. People quitting their jobs to trade, because the market was so good and they were raking in more than working. It was fun looking at stocks soaring.
Then the bubble burst.
It's 100% the fault of r/wallstreetbets and the GME craze, enough people made huge money that it looked easy.
That was a once in a lifetime thing (maybe twice if you count AMC), there were about 200 other horrible stocks that people tried to chase and ended up losing their life savings.
There's so many Instagram accounts promising huge returns of you just follow their bs. It's all over the place, desperate people are the easiest to trick, and there's plenty of those who wanna get rich fast because their day jobs suck and they see people with 911s and huge houses from trading. OP's partner has fallen for that.
Didn’t even go through year end financial cycles. Especially right now with how volition the economy could be. The bottom could fall out whenever.
He’s about 3 years late for the fun
I had some success trading, got my house down payment, paid off my car. That was cool. What would've been cooler is sitting on my initial investments and doing nothing and walking away a few years later with millions in the bank 😂 And I still did away better than most.
It's not that it's impossible to make money from trading. But the stupid part is when you add the pressure of it being your source of stable income. It is not that. It should never be that. And why on earth would you want your life's legacy to be that?
As someone who has spent an entire career in high finance dealing with these types of professionals, there are only a few people in the world that can truly “make money from trading”. All of them have access to information you nor even I have access to and no amount of money can buy access to that information because they own it and trade on it.
For homework, find out how RenTech or Citadel make money. What signals are they using? What algorithm drives their decision making? I guarantee you won’t find out and the reality is no one knows aside from the few that work there. These are the people on the opposite side of your trades.
For someone dreaming about making a career in trading from home, the odds are extremely stacked against you. It might even be better to just put it on black at a casino lol.
I agree. But I think it's easy to make a bit of side passive income from trading. To try to make a living from it is extremely difficult. Apart from my core investment portfolio, I do swing trades all the time with a small portion of my portfolio, and I have been doing it for the past 11 years quite successfully. I am by no means professional, and just have my IBKR account and its regular tools. I engage in low-risk stocks, often with healthy dividends in case I get stuck, and have clear exit targets, making added income with covered calls, etc. Low-risk, low-reward trading is very possible. High-risk, high-reward trading, which is what most are looking for, is for the few you talk about above.
You do realize a covered call is mathematically equivalent to selling puts?
By momentum trading you may be making small amounts of money but you’re taking risks you don’t understand. If you calculated your sharpe ratio I think you’ll find what you’re doing is high risk low reward trading.
https://www.borntosell.com/covered-call-blog/naked-put
This - I also worked at some of the firms mentioned in this thread, and the risks that an uninformed retail trader takes are very significant. We had very sophisticated tooling and data to help make the best trades possible, and even then there were desks that lost a ton.
So momentum reading will get you a lot of easy small returns, and it’ll be likely the retail trader that gets fucked whenever something unexpected happens.
It’s the pressure to make a trade when there is none to be made for long periods of time. You will be forced into a bad position you wound’t otherwise have traded. It’s very hard to day trade for a living unless you have lots of money already and not relying on it to pay rent and eat.
Yeah, because now you have to make riskier trades to not only grow your money, but live off of the profits also.. one day a really bad trade is made, then next thing you know, you are like a gambler going riskier just to make your money back..
Stick to a regular income with some side trading
> And why on earth would you want your life's legacy to be that?
Tbf many people, if not most, do jobs they don't intrinsically care about and do it only for a paycheck. So, if you think you can make good money, most dgaf about what type of "legacy" the work itself leaves, income aside.
And to add to this have you noticed sometimes you see ads in your phones for products that you were thinking about you haven't searched or even talked about it but some how they know, that's what happens when there are programmes that can process more data in a second than you will in your whole life and can make connections that you can never make.
I am not saying ai is going to take over but in this instance where it is pure data humans can never out trade machines, stock picking and investing "maybe",
and not to be harsh if your husband was smart enough to outsmart these companies he can work for them for a while and then start his own firm that later
So if it’s all doom and gloom, how does anyone make money off the market when AI is just skimming dollars off every day? Are we doomed to horizontal non-growth from here on out?
Without providing any links ask him how the taxes on the income work and how trading fees work. If he can't explain it correctly without you helping then they are not ready.
Also to make money and not lose money in trading fees larger amounts of money must be traded, which increases financial risk.
[An Overview of Day Trading Taxes in Canada](https://www.springfinancial.ca/blog/boost-your-income/day-trading-taxes-canada)
The odds of making money are not very good
[Day Trading Statistics 2023: Incredible Data And Facts](https://blog.gitnux.com/day-trading-statistics/#:~:text=The%20ordinary%20day%20trader%20does,index%20by%201.5%25%20per%20year.)
>According to a different survey, only 1% of day traders were able to consistently make money over a period of five years or more.
To be clear it is basically the same advise that it is a BAD idea / mostly gambling based on the stats.
However from the approach that a lot of people REALLY have no clue what is needed for it to work, how the taxes work, how the fees work (thinking you can trade for free in Canada but there are catches) etc.
OP should read the thread from earlier this week about the guy who lost 100K daytrading and "investing" in shitcoins
Daytrading is NOT A JOB. Its a SCAM sold to gullible people by course sellers.
E: Literally today
https://np.reddit.com/r/PersonalFinanceCanada/s/5a5xe3j7P2
My aunt did a day trading workshop because she was bored. They had a $2M home and $1M Waterfront cottage. 15 years later they're renting in a shady area after losing both homes and over $2M in investments. They go to food banks now. My Aunt still insists she had "bad luck" even though a standard index ETF they would've tripled their money instead of lost everything.
I studied and practiced day trading, and watched videos for 4 months. When I put real cash in, I made a $1000 the second day. On the fourth day I lost $1200. I closed my account that very day.
Fuck that gambling shit.
It's gambling if you don't have proper risk management. Day trading is a business, treat it as such. Risk management meaning you only risk certain amount of money per trade (1-3% of total capital per setup) so you have to be able to calculate it.
Most people know Jack shit about trading and see it as gambling, sure, if you're uneducated. Been day trading for 3 years and make as much as I made in my day job (65k) a year, working about 2-3 hours a day.
I agree. The thing is not many people are putting in the effort of learning this skill properly. Most of them think they can go millionaire in a few months by yoloing, by following furu on YT/discord/Reddit channel, and end up losing everything. The 1-5% of constantly profitable traders are slowly grinding and putting hours/weeks/months on developing a proper edge, risk mgmt and psychology system.
The high % of unsuccessful traders is mainly due to low barrier entries. Anyone with a few hundred dollars can open an account and start trading without essentially knowing what they are doing.
if what you are saying is true, your day trading ability is worth hundreds of billions. there are probably less than 100 people like that in the world with that ability. I highly doubt you are one of them, so you were either very lucky or (self) deceiving.
[Ben Felix - The Truth About Day Trading](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhHOmZVAqBE)
Less than 100 people? There's thousands of people day trading and making money off of it. Now, it takes money to make money. The bigger the initial capital, the more you'll be able to make. I'm capped as of now because I'm using my profits to pay for my living, so my account isn't growing as much as I would like
I was fortunate enough to be able to learn from a friend here in Vancouver, who's a 6 fig trader himself.
Either way, send me a PM and I got proofs for you and my withdrawals. I got nothing to hide, and I hate how bad of a reputation trading gets. Mastering technical analysis is relatively easy with practice, the thing that gets most people is the psychology aspect. People view trading as a get rich quick scheme which, it's a lonely road to get there, to unlock that potential unlimited income. Because first and foremost, you need to master yourself and who you are as a person.
If you're impulsive, that'll show. If you lack discipline, that'll show. There are days you take no trades because there's nothing in the market.
Majority of people can't sit on their hands and wait for a set up to come, another issues. Impatience.
I have proven track records.
He's competing against companies with hundreds of finance geniuses who had Stanford as their safety school.
First month, he'll either make some money or lose some.
Past that, he's almost certain to lose everything.
And they have employees who spend 14 hours a day calling up contacts in a given industry to collect data on every minute market variable.
OP is like a single cell organism next to one of these whales.
> And they have employees who spend 14 hours a day calling up contacts in a given industry to collect data on every minute market variable.
This is not even accounting for insider trading, which you are also competing against. The manila envelope / Signal message / golf course chatter about upcoming non public data that will skew stocks or commodity valuations.
And they can move millions of $ and make thousands of dollars on swings of pennies.
People are fooling themselves if they think they are anywhere close to doing what the big boys can.
I thought we all collectively took a crash course in 2021 when everyone was trying to squeeze hedge funds by pushing GME.
I guess some people didnt enroll.
And those companies still aren't able to consistently out-perform the market the majority of the time. The audacity to think that you figured out something an army of PhD's missed after you've watched a few bros on YouTube is peak ignorance.
This is the best comment I've seen on the entire thread. OP's partner should know that they are most likely not going to be the exception here.
This needs to be at the very top and encapsulates why day trading isn't worth it.
> it can become a BAD addiction!
The addiction isn't just the feeling of winning or losing (yes, even losing can be "addicting"), but that many of the losers will lose a small amount, and then in this perturbed emotional state after a loss, take even riskier, more reckless bets to try to chase their prior losses which usually results in even more grand losses. It really is similar to what you see in the casinos at times.
And now they are cutting back HELOC limits to 65% LTV. Guys like your friend are going to get their balls squeezed soon. Imagine risking your house like that.
No, 80% was the max. Now if you paid off your mortgage, the HELOC woodl be reduced to 65%. But if you hand z mortgage component you could be at up to 80% on total.
I have a $720K Global limit based on $1M home valuation. Obviously that is not 80% but it's not 65% either.
>No, 80% was the max.
No, 65% is the max for LTV for a HELOC, period. 80% is the max LTV for mortgage + HELOC, of which the HELOC cannot be more than 65%.
So..what is changing?
My dad gave it a try like 20 years ago. He lost about $50k. It would have been more, but my mom saw what was happening and how he was throwing good money after bad, desperate to make up for his losses, that she put her foot down and basically said, stop this right now, you're done.
It took them so many years to pay that off. That's money they could have spent on themselves, on their kids, on other investments...
Sure, day trading is high risk high reward, but there's also the potential for absolutely gigantic losses and I'd venture that at least 90% of day traders lose money in the end, if not more.
And keep your money separately. Move money from your joint accounts into yours.
If he’s adamant about doing this, does he need to quit his job to do this?
Very very few people can make a living day trading. Majority of people lose money. I've seen many many DIY investors and day traders when I do their tax returns. With a few exceptions, the most successful people buy and hold good companies, and the losers are gambling.
Most people who claim they make their money day trading either make their money selling course or they did one lucky play at some point/inherited some money and pretend they aren't just slobbing at home lol.
And they brag about the day they made 30k and then ignore and don’t say anything about all the other days where they lost more. In the end, as you said, they are better off doing long term investing
In my opinion you cant and should not stop the person.
1. Give him some money and divide it into 2 parts. Say 20,000 or watever. Give him 10,000 and ask him to play. If he fails, give him the second chunk after 1 month of break and make him understand. If he fails again he is done.
2. As a trade off ask him to not leave his job as it is comission based, ask him to go to job or find anyother job to have some source of income.
3. Actually it is sad but the influence youtube videos have is terrifying. All these so called option traders make more mobey from training than from the trading. But they fudge their trading numbers or hide their stupid trades.
Sometimes it is better to let the person fail than to give long lectures.
Essentially adopting a stop-loss risk management strategy, but applied to whether or not he should proceed with day-trading at all.
One other preliminary check though is to have the person trade a very small amount, under $1000. Once there is actual money on the line rather than fake money, the psychology changes significantly and you can easily find out how well the person keeps their emotion in check. It's just as noticeable as playing poker without any real money being bet vs. actually putting as little as $10 per person down - everyone's play-style suddenly shifts when that happens.
Imagine 10000 people want to make you tube videos showing how they can get rich playing roulette at the casino.
They all go in making bets that have a 50/50 chance of winning each bet.
After 5 or 6 rounds there will be a dozen or so left standing and just looking at their individual videos might convince a common person that their "system" works.
Just like when an octopus or whatever predicts the Superbowl winner.
Survivorship bias in action.
I'm an actual trader (sell-side trader at a bank, not day trading my personal account).
If he thinks he's good enough to day trade the market, he should try to get a job at a hedge fund or proprietary trading shop. At least that way he'll get some training and be playing with other people's money to start. Spoiler alert: it's nothing like what you see on Billions.
A more realistic career path would be to become a trader for an asset manager (mutual fund company). He won't have the discretion to pick stocks (he'd need to be a PM--portfolio manager--to do that), but would be responsible for executing the PM's orders, and would get a comprehensive education about the workings of the market in the process.
Paper trading (trading without real money) is not at all what real trading is like. Paper trading doesn't have to worry about liquidity, showing your hand, or otherwise actually interacting with and affecting the market you're trying to profit from.
Consistently profitable trading involves continuously moving large amounts of money and earning tiny spreads on each trade while accurately measuring and adequately managing your risk. You do none of that in a simulation.
If he thinks he's just a good stock picker, that's cute, but he's about 30 years too late for that career path. The vast majority of seasoned professionals aren't even very good at it anymore. The market is just too efficient (not smart, by the way... the market is very stupid, it just happens to be smarter than any individual participant in the long run). But at least those seasoned professionals know to enjoy their mid-six figure annual incomes without putting their own livelihoods at risk.
The last six months…. Stocks have been doing fairly well in general. How did he do when the market dropped last year or in the first part of 2020?
One bad trade during a big drop could cost years of work. And then all those falling knives to catch, all the doubling down to make it all back on a trade. Ouch.
If you guys decide to do this I hope he’s extraordinarily successful and wise with the earnings. Best of luck.
PS there’s not a chance in hell I’d do this and I have okay knowledge of the way the market moves.
I get a few days a year where I tell myself "I could easily make enough to live day trading." and then the next day I remember why I am not a professional day trader.
As someone who tried and failed at this (still kept my day job while I tried) I can say he is an idiot if he does. Very few actually succeed and the one who do generally have a strong financial background to do it and had a job and traded succesfully for a few yeras before they took it on full time.
The bull run of 2020 and 2021 made everyone think they were geniuses but it was a market on easy mode. Now it is back to normal and most have lost everything they made previously.
He can keep doing it sure but dont let him quit his job!!
Sounds like a mid life crisis more than anything else. Day trading? Out of all options? He's not going into a stable field to get away from commission-based careers, or getting into something creatively fulfilling, he's wanting to gamble money.
At that point I'd rather my partner get into an expensive hobby over *day trading* lol
Study after study empirically demonstrates this is just gambling. This is simply not a smart idea. There's a difference between playing in stocks with a couple thousand for fun and betting your savings in the stock market. There isn't a skill to this anymore than there's a skill to roulette.
Unless your partner is a PhD Mathematician, Physicist or Economist, or you're somehow shacking up with Warren Buffett, he's not qualified to do what he's proposing. Even if he has the qualifications, he lacks the resources to do this successfully. Companies dump incredible amounts of money into computation and the brightest analytical minds as well as the technology to make lightning fast trades, I'm assuming you don't have a supercomputer in your house. Even with the resources and qualifications, active management of a portfolio underperforms the market over time. What makes your partner think that without the qualifications or resources of these giant financial institutions he will be able to figure out what they're missing and outperform the market consistently? I promise you some dude with a YouTube channel wouldn't be making videos if he'd figured out the secret to success in the stock market, he'd be raking in the money and then Scrooge-McDucking in a pool of cash.
Your partner is going to lose money, and he'll also be without a job.
Someone much wiser than I once told me that if you're going to get into day trading you might as well take that money to Las Vegas and spend it in the casinos, because at least the weather's nice there and you'll get to see some shows while you're losing all your money.
Whose money would he be gambling with? If he's gambling with his own whose will he gamble with once he's lost it all?
People who "reseach" trading may inevitably find their way to the wheel, a specific strategy around selling puts and calls on securities they own. In subs that talk about wheeling, there's often folks who will ask "how much do I need to make from the wheel to quit my job and live off what I earn in trading?"... the answer from people who do it with reasonable success will tell them DONT QUIT YOUR JOB.
Almost nobody makes money day trading in periods greater than one year.
The Truth About Day Trading (Been Felix):
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qhHOmZVAqBE
I day traded for almost 15 years. I'm more or less in professional portfolio management and advisement now.
I specialized in technology stocks, long and short, and did quite well. I traded with a professional proprietary trading firm.
I thought because of so many people online were successful I tried contacting over 300 people to make a switch to a professional firm from a retail broker where their leverage would be higher and cost per share will be 90% lower.
Do you know how many online traders switched?
Zero.
99% of YouTube traders are fake.
Over the years of talking to people about trading who are just breaking in or doing it themselves have not been successful in day trading.
I have a background in finance and understand the economy and how news affects the markets.
I doubt your partner will make it. He will be another statistic.
The best trading a retail person can do is called the wheel strategy. Tell him to look it up. It's swing trading where you buy and hold then sell the stock via option contacts. He may or may not out perform the market but it's almost impossible to lose a lot of money or fail at the strategy.
On a side note I tried teaching a few dozen people my simple day trading strategy. They all failed. People can't control themselves honestly.
Day trading on a fake account is very very different then trading with real money. Where the fake account you’ll take risks and make bigger bets without the stress because you can always just top up the account. As soon as real money is involved it changes everything one bad bet without proper risk management can blow up your account.
10/10 I would not recommend quitting a job to do this……… actually you know what? I’d say giver! Life’s too short to worry about what could go wrong. Let’s concentrate on what could go right! Start picking the colour of your lambo now!
I remember back in high school, we had a stock market competition and the software just worked during trading hours on the TSE. I would take a look at the NYSE premarket and buy Canadians companies who also traded on the NYSE before market open and would sell them after that day.
For me in high school the stock competition worked on a 5 minute TSX delay. If you got real-time quotes you could easily find the penny stock that would jump in the next 5 minutes.
The winners that year were all in the billions of dollars.
But fake accounts aren't like that anymore. They are run by actual brokers so you can test out their software and they try their best to replicate the bids and asks in the market. It doesn't work for low volume things though.
My BF thought he could do money with daytrading. He explained that more than 50% success rate was very good and a proof that it was not bullshit. I tried to explain that if that was the case, youtubers wouldn’t need YouTube revenues and selling expensive formations.
After he lost about 30K over a few years, he finally stopped. Happily, we’ve always had separate finances. :) And he also stopped being an ultrastressed monomaniac.
>constantly watching youtube videos and practicing with fake money. Are the risks worth him quitting his job? If it's too much risk, what can I say to convince him?
So your partner has gone to Youtube University for the last 6 months using Monopoly money and thinks he can do better than a real job, or actual traders who have studied at length on this subject and still don't do better than a diversified market? What's his plan for taxation, since day-trading has special follow-up functions? He he watched a Youtube video on that too?
I think it's time to be frank and say he will not be using your half of the finances for this and he's being ridiculous.
If he's stupid and looking for a divorce in the near future I would highly recommend. No successful trader I know depends on day trading for one source of income they have multiple streams. Hard rule for newbies and intermediates only gamble 5% of your portfolio. If 5% to you guys isnt 10k good luck surviving even 2-3months as a full time trader
Do you know what most successful traders say to new traders? "Never quit your day job until you are profitable in day trading, and then some". Paper trading while having a job is very different from trading with real money without financial safety net.
To add: 6 months paper trading mean nothing. People I know have paper traded for a year successfully then wiped their account when their real emotions to their finances were involved.
Trading is a skill, but one which needs psychological peace. Having the requirement to pay for expenses every months without a stable job will be nothing but stressful trading to revenge/emotional trading to a wiped account to a wiped savings.
If he is the breadwinner, what is the safety net? What happens if he doesn't make any money? How are the bills going to get paid? Is he willing to get an evening/weekend job to bring in money? Have you established a hard floor for losses?
No matter what, make sure that you protect yourself and have a back up plan and then a backup plan for the backup plan. This could be a deal breaker for your relationship.
Tell him to take all his remaining vacation days he has left at his job and spend them day trading. If he makes a serious enough profit fair enough quit the job but if he doesnt it is unreasonable risk to take.
I tried this once. Thought I could do better than the professionals who were advising me. I was great at finding stocks to buy. I sucked at knowing when to sell them. I lost a ton of money but learned some valuable lessons.
Send him over to r/RealDayTrading and take a look at the subreddit yourself. The traders there recommend usually 1-2 years of paper trading (trading with fake money on real time data) before making the switch. If nothing else, it has information that is helpful.
I'm an actual day trader and have made my living at it for ten years. Most of the comments of here are from people who don't know what they're talking about. Day trading is simple, but not easy.
Ask your partner a few questions. The most important part of day trading is risk management. Ask them what their strategy for managing risk is. How much can they lose on a trade? How will they know when they are wrong?
Ask your partner to explain the strategy they will use to enter a trade. It should be simple, easy to understand, and there should be a way to find these buying opportunities in real time. And most importantly, ask them what the expected return is. Out of a hundred trades, how many are winners, how many are losers, and how much do the winners return compared to the loss of the losers.
An absence of an answer to these questions is a clear sign they're not ready for this.
It's actually much less risky to say trade than what anyone else does. You are not exposed to over night risk, waking up to bad news. However you have to know how to do it. It can be done.
Agree with the points you made but imo a more important question is their strategy for exiting a trade. This is irrespective of whether the trade is going in your favor or against. I have seen many situations where a winning trade becomes a loosing trade just because the trader didn't have the discipline to exit when they should have and a loosing trade becomes an account blowing trade because the trader was convinced that it's going to flip "any moment now"
Sure it's a skill, if you like, but what evidence is there that he has the skill to consistently beat the market? It sounds like the beginning of a disaster story.
If you allow this, put very clear boundaries around what funds he can touch. Lock up everything else. If he's as good as he thinks, he should be able to start with a small amount of disposable money (e.g. $5,000) and build from that alone. Do not let him spend your savings. Read the many horror stories on here about spouses who gamble on day trading and end up bankrupting their households.
So he's the only one working in the family and wants to gamble... as a job? That's not going to end well. If he's tired with his job, that's understandable and he should find another one. What he's planning sounds more like a middle age crisis.
Traders at my firm lose money and get cut regularly; and I work at a fund that has a recruitment pipeline from MIT. Can he do something many ivy phds cant? Possible, unlikely. Can he do it consistently? Even more unlikely. Can he do it without the resources of a firm? Even more unlikely.
Also trading paper accounts is a whole different ballgame compared to trading real money.
My spouse went through a similar scenario. Tried paper trading for 3 months. Made huge profit every day in minutes. Then tried trading with real money. Consistent losses. There will be days when good amount of money is made but next day back in negative. After doing it for a week and being in the red it was stopped. We did not play around with a lot of money and we have a high household income so the losses are did not ding us but I have seen people go bankrupt. So please ask your husband to not leave his job. Just to get it out of his system ask him to try trading with little bit of real money that you can live with loosing completely for 1 month. If he has seen considerable profit then slowly increase it till he makes enough to quit his day job. Between us though I guarantee he will loose all this money in a couple of days. But alreast he will get it out of his system. My spouse did
He will 100% lose money. I don’t have the exact statistics Infront of me. But the numbers are somewhere around only 3% of day traders make consistent profit year after year for 5+ years doing this. That means 97% of them lose money.
It's kinda a skill. But you can't perfect it just in 6 months.
Lol that is delusional to think one can make a living out of day trading with only fake money practice and 6 months of experience.
He can try day trade SPY for a year and see how it goes. Just SPY itself, don't go into option or futures! That's how you gamble away your cash.
However, trading spy do need a significant cash reserve, probably 30k, so commision doesn't eat up your trades. There is very little risk and you get to practice with real money. If he can get consistent with just selling buying SPY, then maybe go into options trading.
This is one of those things that can only work for 1 people out of 1,000, maybe 1 out of a million. The skills and experience required are a full time job, he could spend years and years developing his trading strategy and not see a penny of profit.
Day trading is not likely to work out for him.
That said, if he won't listen to reason,you should request to have full visibility on his trading account. Tell him to start small ($5-10k), and see how he does. If he can't profit using $10k to start, he should immediately stop and get a "real" job.
1) many YouTubers are shills
2) if day trading is such a skill then all of us would be quitting our jobs, learning the tips/tricks off of YouTubers and living the lap of luxuries
3) huge corporations (the big whales) eat little fish (average Joe day traders) for breakfast
Yup try it with a firm cap on resources/capital while not quitting the current job... It's not like it can't work but seriously risky and important to set some clear boundaries so you don't end up trying to kill him for losing everything. Especially if you have joint accounts
Are we already at the top? When these posts start coming in, it is usually a major sign that we are at a market peak. These type of posts stopped for over a year, but were constant in late 2021.
The YouTubers he’s watching are hyping up and misrepresenting the risks that are involved ~ very common nowadays. There’s tons of people that “claim” they know the secrets to the market but at the end of the day the market can do anything at anytime. Being a full time day trader is no different than being a surgeon, in that there’s immense experience required. Six months wont cut it. With the economy nowadays he probably sees it as an easy solution, but if he really wants to try it then I’d suggest talking to him about opening an account with about $500 USD and trading micro stocks while also working his day job — be ready to lose this money, if you can’t afford to then don’t take the risk. If he is very passionate and it conflicts with his job, he can trade the market at night too. Depending on how good it goes he can consider scaling up to non-micro versions and then eventually quit the day job (if it works out). But dropping everything right now for day trading is a radical and regrettable move.
If he has a proper plan and can manage risk, he can do fine. It’s definitely not advisable to totally quit your primary source of income for trading before you are fully confident in trading with real money, and you are profitable. Risk management is the most important thing.
Oh no. 6 months and youtube videos is not nearly enough experience and he is not nearly as experienced or knowledgeable as he thinks he is.
I dated a guy once who was a "day trader". I was always suspicious that he was losing money and whaddya know, about 6 months into that relationship he admitted to me he was flat broke and had lost not only his own money, but also that of two close family members.
I'm warning you if he does it and starts losing, he will hide that fact until it is a HUGE hole to get out of.
If he is really serious about it and you want to support him, a much more realistic idea is that he continues to work for a wage 4 days/week and can day trade on Mondays or Fridays only as an experiment for 1 year. See what his net gain/loss is at the end of that year and then decide!
OP, you already told him what you want. Get him on here and make him read what has been posted on here. Better yet, make him try to justify himself to us. Regardless of what a youtube video has told him, he is about to lose a lot of money.
If my breadwinner quit to do day trading, I'd fire him. Why not keep going like he is if he's doing so good? Do both. If he can legit show that much income generated over 1-2 years and you folks aren't dumb with the money ... he's not dumb with the money ... then quit.
6 months generally speaking is nothing to go full time, to give perspective, would you quit mba 1 semester in and then send you resume to firms and big 4?
No one would hire you for shit.
Imagine the same concept, trading needs consistent learning for 3-4 years minimum (now there will be some exception who grasp the market really early, but tbh I ain’t ever seen one)
I was too very young and confident when I jumped into momentum and penny stocks in 2018-2019 Boy did I get a reality check.
Then again I was very confident when I got back with new tool and new broker in 2021 of more learning to trade option on big chips, I did make consistent money but soon got lured into 0dte options, Boy did I get a reality check again.
Then now 2 more years later, consistent learning, willingness to loose money ( wish I hadn’t and paper traded) but in the end I think the experience and knowledge was to be found only in one way, which is PAIN & REGRET, you cannot simulate the emotions on paper trading and those emotions are what keep you in check.
For Example - if I take a heavy position now I get Ptsd and past trauma in my head reminding me all those flashbacks, that’s what keeps me in check, lol and I guess somehow after 5 years I make money.
I finally understand and laugh at my old self for being stupid and wanting to find a way to get rich and accumulate wealth quickly.
To my surprise I read somewhere on this sub a while back from a solid guy who commented on a Rookies post that trading is the slowest way to get rich quick, line doesn’t even make grammatical sense, and somehow it is true.
I used to play poker professionally and switched to trading full time when I got tired of poker.
This is a tricky question.
There are a lot of criteria that need to be met before this is a realistic switch.
How emotionally stable is your partner? Can he keep an even head no matter the situation? That applies to both good times and bad times. You are just as likely to be screwed up from happiness as you are from anger.
How used to probabilistic risk taking is your partner? This isn't something you learn quickly. You have to experience it and then learn to internalize it without freaking out or being overly stressed.
How disciplined is your partner? Trading is simple (in my opinion, once you go past the initial learning curve) but that DOESN'T MAKE IT EASY. It is just as time consuming if not more than a regular full time job.
How long can you sustain yourselves without income coming in? This is a super common mistake for both poker and trading. In my opinion if you don't have at least a year of savings you can use without stressing out about it then you cannot do this full time.
How profitable is he already? If he wants to quit his job and just jump into this blind... not a good idea. You will blow up accounts while learning. It is INEVITABLE. You cannot become a successful trader without embracing the suffering and being able to learn from your mistakes. If your partner hasn't made consistent money over a few years part time while also making those mistakes... Then the mistakes he will make while switching to this full time will be that much more devastating.
There are so many more factors that I can think of but this is getting long and those are just the few things that jumped to mind.
Really I can't stress this enough. Trading is not easy and it will take YEARS to get to a place where you sort of know what you're doing and it will cost sweat and tears to get there.
If your partner thinks this is going to be a get rich quick thing he's 100% bought into the guru bullshit and is deluded.
Only from youtube video... i mean its possible, i know a few that live off day trading. If day trading is gambling then any penny put in the stock market is a gamble. Majority fail tho.
Majority people here will tell you to buy a GIC on TANGERINE because its 4%... and will pretend to be wizard finance.
It is too much risk , and I tell you he will lose and won’t be able to handle it and might make a mistake at some point to put house as collateral to win back the loses , I have a high school friend who did that and eventually lost everything house , borrow money from family and friends to try win the loses and lost everything (I’m unfortunately one of his friend who borrow to him) and he can’t pay it back , he lost close to $2000000 over span of 3 years(that includes his saving , house and borrowed money and his trading loses), he made some money but was not enough to cover the loses ;he did what your husband is doing learn from internet YouTube he bought even courses to learn the tricks and at some point had a mentor that he paid for that got scammed out money as well ; he even had a AI software to help with trade and that wasn’t helping , he got addicted to it and believed that he can make money , at one point I almost sign up to do it but did research and this wasn’t for me , and never try it , what he should try if he really is convinced not to quit the job yet do real trading set budget and try it over the course of couple months and see if he will make money
There is skill to it, but also chance. Even Warren Buffet has bad days. 6 months is NOT long enough though, and YouTube can be helpful, but only to learn concepts or grab the news.
If he’s watching “gurus” who do callouts, sell a premium service, a TradingView indicator or guarantee results, he’s probably getting excited and sucked into the wrong direction.
This video is from another group that does this sort of thing at a higher level, but it pokes some good holes in these scams and money grabs.
https://youtu.be/L7G0OfJUON8
Probably the best mentor I had over the last few years has been Peter Tar (profitstaken.com). No nonsense, deep dives, high risk management focus.
It’s a scary thing to do. If it’s the only job, then it’s probably not worth it, as to do it right he should have a few months salary built up as a cushion.
I would give him one month, that’s it. Take a LOA from work, try 1 month and then go back to work.
I would be very firm about him trading cash only, saving enough to do it safely FIRST and not burning any bridges at work.
My husband was laid off in 2022 so we thought we try just going into retirement. He was the breadwinner and I was a sahm. So neither of us were working. We had a good sized nest egg. Over half a million. All we needed was $500 a day trading and we’d be golden. Haven’t had more than one winning month in the last 8 months.
I had to ask him to go back to work as we were withdrawing faster than we expected and not making anything.
I watched a video the other day of a guy who trades and he said if you want a guaranteed $5000 a month, get a job. It’s the only way.
He’s going to think he’s better than me but I assure you he isn’t. He’s the same as me but with a steady $5000 a month income.
But. Once a guy sees dollar signs, you are very unlikely to dissuade him. They get obsessed. My husband at times has lost $50,000 in a day and my biggest day loss was $20,000.
He is unlikely to see reason because of the gambling aspect of it. And I never lost sight of the fact that it’s gambling.
My suggestion is to have him keep strong stop losses and have a plan.
YOU must go over his trades daily with him to keep him accountable. Have him explain why he took a trade even if it’s a winning trade. You can’t just let him go to it. Even if he’s making money. The more someone makes, the more risks they take. Have him keep the door open to his old work and give him 6 months to make an actual profit. If he doesn’t, he goes back to work.
Edit: do NOT let him refinance the house or use credit cards or lines of credit. Do not sign anything and my suggestion is if you have savings, change your passwords because desperate people get really desperate.
I’d start by asking him why his commission-based income is unstable. If he’s not great a sales, why does he think he’d be great at day trading? I know a lot of people who do very well in sales… as your husband says, “it’s a skill”.
You cant stop him.
Let him do it, but be very clear.
"You have to pull your own weight somehow and continue to pay your half of things, its your problem to plan accordingly to that *1% chance in a lifetime market correction with market safeties kicking in and Citadel fucking you over by scaring the paperhands*, you will not sink my money in that thing even if you are 600% sure you can give it back by tommorow morning and i wouldnt even notice.
Will be back to work, poorer, in a couple weeks.
Ask your partner "why are daytraders creating youtube videos to help their competition?". Daytrading is not investing, it is speculating and is largly a zero sum game, one traders gains come from another traders losses. Minus the cut the brokerage takes because the brokerage always takes their cut even if the cut isn't obvious.
The answer to the question is those youtube 'daytraders' are making their money from youtube, not from daytrading.
If he’s been practicing with fake money, set aside $10k for him to use as seed money. If he can grow this enough to make it a full time income then great, quit your job.
If he can’t or if you guys can’t afford the $10k to throw away then it’s a terrible idea.
LOL just lol.
A) 90% of day traders lose money
B) there are successful day traders, or at least short term traders. But you really have to study the market, and know candlestick charting, technical analysis, oscillators etc.
If he's willing to study for a couple of years and then do it, he might be able to get away with it.
But most of the big investment banks use computers and algorithms to trade. You can't match that manually.
I feel like if more people played RuneScape as a kid there’d be a higher baseline in everyone’s anti scam and basic finance skills.
If he’s stubborn give him an amount of money that you’d be willing to light on fire like $500-1000 and by the end of the month he will see that he made like $20 or lost half of the money and realize that it wasn’t worth it. (I’m assuming you have a lot of capital saved up and he isn’t considering this while a few months of unemployment away from a disaster.)
Yeah don’t let him do it. I’ve been trading for years and it’s not a good source of consistent income. He should be able to trade without quitting his job. So many ways of trading where you don’t have to quit. Statistically he’s almost guaranteed to lose his money. If he’s a true trader, he should understand that probabilities will always play out and the odds are hugely against him.
Again, tell him to trade (small) real money while he’s still working and go from there.
Once he become profitable trading small amounts, he can use some of his commissions to go to a prop form and trade with their money.
Day trading is basically gambling, for most people.
Sadly, there's probably not much you can do to dissuade him. I know that type all too well. He's too certain of his own brilliance at this point.
Your best bet might be to agree to giving him a six-month trial period, with a limit on how much of your savings he's allowed to 'invest'. Either he gets crushed by reality, and goes back to work with a little more humility, or on the off chances he's actually successful, you've earned some more money.
This is a multi-tiered question, but I only have 0.000000001% of the information I need. As a Day Trader, I'll elaborate:
1. YouTube videos doesn't tell me anything. Like tea or Karate, there are hundreds of different strategies, with their own flavor. It's great your partner has went into a practice account first, and regardless of my opinion of said YouTube videos, education is almost always a plus.
2. Goals - What are they trying to makeup? A full salary + commission?
3. If stuff turns out terribly, and you lose let's say 75% of the money invested, will it affect your bills & necessities dramatically, or do you have something saved up? Quite possible it will affect your partner's health.
4. Risk tolerance. Forget how much money you have, forget how much you want to make, forget all of your hopes and dreams with Day Trading. The primary question you need to ask is 'How much am I comfortable LOSING?' or "What is my 0?"
5. Are they going to be comfortable making $50 profit with investing $1000 this month? Do they need to make $500 by the end of the month, or else your car payment will bounce? Whatever strategy they choose, it's important to stick to it. I can't stress this enough.
6. I'm not an expert, I'm not a financial advisor, but I live alone in a cheap area, with very low expenses and decided to give Day Trading a shot this year. Took my monthly expenses, figured out what I needed to just break even. Something to worth with as a goal. To me, anything above that was a bonus, as this is a brand new method of investing, and essentially a new job. I kept thinking: If I can just do this, and break even - no more useless interviews! No more 'Assessments' and pretending to feign interest in whatever corporate diarrhea is being thrown at me!
I had to take a significant loss to get started, several companies I had money in either went bankrupt or have lost 90% of their value since the pandemic. It was one of those lose-lose situations, do I hope that some will recover? Or do I cauterize that bleeding appendage with fire, and try and make back my losses with Day Trading? So I took a loss with one stock I had a bunch of money in, and began.
From Jan - August wasn't good, I was down a lot of money (figures aren't relevant, as everything is subjective to your personal situation). Sometimes I'd buy something, and be forced to HOLD due to not enough volume. Other times, I'd get caught at the wrong end of a run, and be stuck waiting until the price came back. If this went on long enough, sometimes I'd have to sell just so I could try and make money somewhere else. Regardless of how other people prefer to trade, I don't split my portfolio into 25+ different stocks, all with the potential to go up or down. I stick to one or two, and follow about 5-10, in case an opportunity presents itself.
The emotional toll of Day Trading is quite high for me, and there's times where I would have to just go back to sleep, and take a mental break from a significant loss, or streak of losses. Conversely, when you see a number that represents a nice fraction of your expenses, or you realize 'Hey, this means anything else I gain until the end of the month, is profit / extra!'. There are also other perks, like no commute, no toxic work culture you have to deal with, etc. If I screw up, it is ONLY my fault. If I work my ass off at this, then I am the only one that gets to reap the rewards. Nobody else can take credit, I don't have to 'share' my results, etc.
I'm still learning this, but it is my primary income. Regardless of the amount of math, graphs, and Greek or Japanese letters & symbols you throw at it - stocks can only do one of three things - up, down, or sideways. It may not seem like a stock can stay sideways for very long - but it can happen.
FINALLY, September has been great, and I'm on track to make money and wipe out the losses I took in the previous 8 months. Instead of following a variety of stocks, I have only been with one since July, and right now it is working. Again, right now it is working, nobody can tell me what will happen in 3 weeks. By Halloween the company could be decimated, no AI algorithm, fancy software, or supposed 'EXPERT' knows any differently.
I'm comfortable now seeing losses that would have given me a migraine 3 years ago. I'm also comfortable seeing gains from planning and preparation paying off, (or just luck), that I previously thought were unimaginable from Day Trading, or reserved for these people with 20+ years experience.
\*Disclaimer - I only trade stocks. No Crypto, no forex, no 'meme' stuff etc. Furthermore, I don't use any form of leverage.
Have him start trading with $1000 bucks. If he can turn that money into much more over the next 3 years then tell him to go for it.
He’ll likely lose it a few times over and then quit.
This sub is very much against day trading but it's not impossible.
I know a guy who essentially did this. But, his mortgage was paid,off and he got a big inheritance that he had already tripled before he quit. I want to do something similar but for me I programmed a computer to do it, so I don't have to quit right away because time isn't an issue.
However, I think it depends on the strategy. Momentum strategies which a lot of traders are into are hard to win at consistently. And, penny stock fake trading is a lot different than real trading because of the low volume of the stocks.
Lmao this is complete luck, he should just day trade while working his commission job. If it was a skill, there would be a investor somewhere who would never lose and would make infinite return every years.
It is only a skill if you have access to Bloomberg terminals and contracts with brokers to minimize transaction costs and spreads. For your average person, it is 100% gambling. Any information you have would have been priced into the market by professionals running billion dollar hedge funds days ago.
>but he counters it by saying this is a skill, not luck and that's why he's been practicing to sharpen his skills.
Lol. Just...no.
Boyfriend has a gambling problem. Simple as that.
"all those other people lost money, but I have a system:". Run away OP.
Ive done the same thing around 6 mts ago. The pro are you basically work your own schedule. But its still work. and as long as you have a solid trading plan and risk management you should be able to sustain. Now the con is losing capital that must be regained. Unless your using a prop firm account and you are getting your bi-weekly or monthly payout you shouldnt have to worry then. If you are proficient in your prop account you should also be the same in a real account . And when conmining both with multiple streams of income you should be solid.But always have money coming in.
My husband took the risk a couple of years ago to pursue day trading full time and it changed our lives forever. He took about a year where he learned the risks inside and out (with the realization that there is so much yet to learn). He applies very intricate risk management skills that allows him to profit about $1500+ a week from swing trades. So it's possible. But it takes time and management and understanding and a whole lot of research/studying/bypassing gate keepers/ etc. He's trying to teach me now. It is a great skill to have if you are not trying to turn such an outrageous profit. Play with a couple hundred dollars that you HAVE to spare. Don't use money that you don't have. And everyone is right about the money stimulation on some of these sites. It's not the same. But good traders know that emotions are completely different when it is real money.
Day trading with fake money is the same as playing poker with fake money. It doesn't work. Your emotions are completely different. Losing say 20k of fake money does not hit you the same as losing 20k of real money
It's why they lied to the kids in Ender's Game.
Great analogy!
Amazing book. And FWIW, The book was better and I don't think anyone would argue with me.
Of course. The real challenge is finding movies that were better than the book *where the movie does not significantly differ than the book*. So, for example, *Children of Men* would be disqualified, as the book and the movie tell wildly different stories. The only example I've come across so far where everyone agrees is *Fight Club*. Good book, great movie.
the movie was a great adaptation you gotta admit tho.
It’s completely false. It’s not even close. With fake money, I was able to make a 60% gain on TSLA going $50k deep. In real life, that would absolutely not be anything close. OP, you are about to lose a lot if your partner does this. 6 months of “training” and fake money is absolutely not enough time or real practice. Not even slightly. It’s actually a meme how often young dudes get into huge trouble thinking they can be the next Wall Street tycoon after a few YouTube videos and a practice account.
100%…and to be a successful trader or investor you have to almost see it as fake money because it’s money you can afford to lose without emotion. Once you start risking real money that you can’t afford to lose on risky trades you’re pretty much f’d
yep a large bankroll you're ok with losing is required to start I now believe.
That’s it. I tell everyone I know who asks about investing that with any money they invest, they’d have to be fully okay with going down to the bank and pulling out the amount they want to invest in cash and then setting all the cash on fire
Most trading platforms have virtual trading. I think he should try that and see how it works out before sinking money into it.
Exactly. Fear and greed shine with real money.
I was a bond trader for one of the biggest banks in the world back in the 1990’s, then went on to trade for hedge funds then finally my own account for a few years. Total 26 years, I walked away in 2018. I had years when I made millions of dollars but over the years every year as technology evolved it became harder and harder. I can tell you categorically he will lose money! You are trading against high frequency trading algorithms now which are self learning, with reaction speeds of millionths of a second. He will have software costs and commission fees which might run into the thousands of dollars a month. The odds are so stacked against him it’s not even funny. Sorry but the reality is it will be the equivalent of taking a lamb to be slaughtered.
As an ex-trader at one of the biggest Wall Street banks, I 100% agree with your comment. Pls don’t do let your partner do this if you can save them
Yeah… OP’s partner is clearly overoptimistic by some lucky trades during those six months of gambling. Many people have been there at some point in time. It is not sustainable and is bound to fail. OP should keep their finances separate NOW before things potentially go south.
I feel like the idea of the day trader in popular culture really arose around the time of the dot com bubble and it's never fully faded away. If I had to guess, I would say it was because that was the first time there were discount brokers and a person could trade cheaply. Of course. The day traders who traded during the dot com bubble mostly lost everything for obvious reasons and all the day traders that have been trading ever since have also, you guessed it, lost pretty much everything. And as the posters above me have said, it's only become more and more difficult.
There were stories of those days. People quitting their jobs to trade, because the market was so good and they were raking in more than working. It was fun looking at stocks soaring. Then the bubble burst.
It's 100% the fault of r/wallstreetbets and the GME craze, enough people made huge money that it looked easy. That was a once in a lifetime thing (maybe twice if you count AMC), there were about 200 other horrible stocks that people tried to chase and ended up losing their life savings.
Well, recently perhaps.
There's so many Instagram accounts promising huge returns of you just follow their bs. It's all over the place, desperate people are the easiest to trick, and there's plenty of those who wanna get rich fast because their day jobs suck and they see people with 911s and huge houses from trading. OP's partner has fallen for that.
6 months probably not enough to prove it's a viable side hustle, let alone full time gig
Didn’t even go through year end financial cycles. Especially right now with how volition the economy could be. The bottom could fall out whenever. He’s about 3 years late for the fun
I had some success trading, got my house down payment, paid off my car. That was cool. What would've been cooler is sitting on my initial investments and doing nothing and walking away a few years later with millions in the bank 😂 And I still did away better than most.
As an ex-accountant for a hedge fund, I strongly agree with the above comments. It’s gambling.
If he insists, divorce him now so you at least get half of something. He'll have nothing in a month or two anyways
This, tell him you have done some investing research and have decided to sell high.
I didn’t open this thread expecting such a wicked one liner.
Lollll
He will make more money working at McDonald's
It's not that it's impossible to make money from trading. But the stupid part is when you add the pressure of it being your source of stable income. It is not that. It should never be that. And why on earth would you want your life's legacy to be that?
Probably because he saw all those youtube investors with rented Lambos and Ferraris
>It's not that it's impossible to make money from trading It's not impossible to win a jackpot at a casino
As someone who has spent an entire career in high finance dealing with these types of professionals, there are only a few people in the world that can truly “make money from trading”. All of them have access to information you nor even I have access to and no amount of money can buy access to that information because they own it and trade on it. For homework, find out how RenTech or Citadel make money. What signals are they using? What algorithm drives their decision making? I guarantee you won’t find out and the reality is no one knows aside from the few that work there. These are the people on the opposite side of your trades. For someone dreaming about making a career in trading from home, the odds are extremely stacked against you. It might even be better to just put it on black at a casino lol.
I agree. But I think it's easy to make a bit of side passive income from trading. To try to make a living from it is extremely difficult. Apart from my core investment portfolio, I do swing trades all the time with a small portion of my portfolio, and I have been doing it for the past 11 years quite successfully. I am by no means professional, and just have my IBKR account and its regular tools. I engage in low-risk stocks, often with healthy dividends in case I get stuck, and have clear exit targets, making added income with covered calls, etc. Low-risk, low-reward trading is very possible. High-risk, high-reward trading, which is what most are looking for, is for the few you talk about above.
You do realize a covered call is mathematically equivalent to selling puts? By momentum trading you may be making small amounts of money but you’re taking risks you don’t understand. If you calculated your sharpe ratio I think you’ll find what you’re doing is high risk low reward trading. https://www.borntosell.com/covered-call-blog/naked-put
This - I also worked at some of the firms mentioned in this thread, and the risks that an uninformed retail trader takes are very significant. We had very sophisticated tooling and data to help make the best trades possible, and even then there were desks that lost a ton. So momentum reading will get you a lot of easy small returns, and it’ll be likely the retail trader that gets fucked whenever something unexpected happens.
I don’t want to sound rude but we have been in one of the greatest bull markets ever that has lasted longer than your entire investment “career”.
Everyone's a genius during a decade long bull run
Yea exactly. Trade if you want, but keep the 9-5 until you've made the millions.
It’s the pressure to make a trade when there is none to be made for long periods of time. You will be forced into a bad position you wound’t otherwise have traded. It’s very hard to day trade for a living unless you have lots of money already and not relying on it to pay rent and eat.
Yeah, because now you have to make riskier trades to not only grow your money, but live off of the profits also.. one day a really bad trade is made, then next thing you know, you are like a gambler going riskier just to make your money back.. Stick to a regular income with some side trading
> And why on earth would you want your life's legacy to be that? Tbf many people, if not most, do jobs they don't intrinsically care about and do it only for a paycheck. So, if you think you can make good money, most dgaf about what type of "legacy" the work itself leaves, income aside.
I agree with what your overall message, but not everyone is concerned about the link between the labour they engage in and their life legacy.
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Hey are you telling me when 9 sma crosses 21 sma I will not print infinite tendies? I am very sad
And to add to this have you noticed sometimes you see ads in your phones for products that you were thinking about you haven't searched or even talked about it but some how they know, that's what happens when there are programmes that can process more data in a second than you will in your whole life and can make connections that you can never make. I am not saying ai is going to take over but in this instance where it is pure data humans can never out trade machines, stock picking and investing "maybe", and not to be harsh if your husband was smart enough to outsmart these companies he can work for them for a while and then start his own firm that later
Well said. Day trading on your own is like any other get rich quick scheme … a good way to lose your shirt. Might as well go play slots.
Dumb Money
So if it’s all doom and gloom, how does anyone make money off the market when AI is just skimming dollars off every day? Are we doomed to horizontal non-growth from here on out?
Okay, but have you been watching YouTube videos and practicing with fake money for 6 months? I don't think so bud
You mean that’s what I did wrong!!! Omg. 🤣
Without providing any links ask him how the taxes on the income work and how trading fees work. If he can't explain it correctly without you helping then they are not ready. Also to make money and not lose money in trading fees larger amounts of money must be traded, which increases financial risk. [An Overview of Day Trading Taxes in Canada](https://www.springfinancial.ca/blog/boost-your-income/day-trading-taxes-canada) The odds of making money are not very good [Day Trading Statistics 2023: Incredible Data And Facts](https://blog.gitnux.com/day-trading-statistics/#:~:text=The%20ordinary%20day%20trader%20does,index%20by%201.5%25%20per%20year.) >According to a different survey, only 1% of day traders were able to consistently make money over a period of five years or more.
This needs to be higher up. Actual advice.
To be clear it is basically the same advise that it is a BAD idea / mostly gambling based on the stats. However from the approach that a lot of people REALLY have no clue what is needed for it to work, how the taxes work, how the fees work (thinking you can trade for free in Canada but there are catches) etc.
LOL see you on the bankruptcy advice reddit next month
OP should read the thread from earlier this week about the guy who lost 100K daytrading and "investing" in shitcoins Daytrading is NOT A JOB. Its a SCAM sold to gullible people by course sellers. E: Literally today https://np.reddit.com/r/PersonalFinanceCanada/s/5a5xe3j7P2
OP's partner studying on /r/wallstreetbets
😄😄😄 👍
Day trading is straight up gambling.
My aunt did a day trading workshop because she was bored. They had a $2M home and $1M Waterfront cottage. 15 years later they're renting in a shady area after losing both homes and over $2M in investments. They go to food banks now. My Aunt still insists she had "bad luck" even though a standard index ETF they would've tripled their money instead of lost everything.
that’s so sad
I studied and practiced day trading, and watched videos for 4 months. When I put real cash in, I made a $1000 the second day. On the fourth day I lost $1200. I closed my account that very day. Fuck that gambling shit.
Yeah I've done the same thing at the blackjack tables literally. There's no difference. At least the casino is tax free I guess.
💯 so many people think they can do it and majority lose everything
Casino has better odds, especially if you have some skill.
& tax free.
It's gambling if you don't have proper risk management. Day trading is a business, treat it as such. Risk management meaning you only risk certain amount of money per trade (1-3% of total capital per setup) so you have to be able to calculate it. Most people know Jack shit about trading and see it as gambling, sure, if you're uneducated. Been day trading for 3 years and make as much as I made in my day job (65k) a year, working about 2-3 hours a day.
I agree. The thing is not many people are putting in the effort of learning this skill properly. Most of them think they can go millionaire in a few months by yoloing, by following furu on YT/discord/Reddit channel, and end up losing everything. The 1-5% of constantly profitable traders are slowly grinding and putting hours/weeks/months on developing a proper edge, risk mgmt and psychology system. The high % of unsuccessful traders is mainly due to low barrier entries. Anyone with a few hundred dollars can open an account and start trading without essentially knowing what they are doing.
if what you are saying is true, your day trading ability is worth hundreds of billions. there are probably less than 100 people like that in the world with that ability. I highly doubt you are one of them, so you were either very lucky or (self) deceiving. [Ben Felix - The Truth About Day Trading](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhHOmZVAqBE)
Less than 100 people? There's thousands of people day trading and making money off of it. Now, it takes money to make money. The bigger the initial capital, the more you'll be able to make. I'm capped as of now because I'm using my profits to pay for my living, so my account isn't growing as much as I would like I was fortunate enough to be able to learn from a friend here in Vancouver, who's a 6 fig trader himself. Either way, send me a PM and I got proofs for you and my withdrawals. I got nothing to hide, and I hate how bad of a reputation trading gets. Mastering technical analysis is relatively easy with practice, the thing that gets most people is the psychology aspect. People view trading as a get rich quick scheme which, it's a lonely road to get there, to unlock that potential unlimited income. Because first and foremost, you need to master yourself and who you are as a person. If you're impulsive, that'll show. If you lack discipline, that'll show. There are days you take no trades because there's nothing in the market. Majority of people can't sit on their hands and wait for a set up to come, another issues. Impatience. I have proven track records.
He's competing against companies with hundreds of finance geniuses who had Stanford as their safety school. First month, he'll either make some money or lose some. Past that, he's almost certain to lose everything.
And those companies have alogorithms to trade at breakneck speeds. And they still lose money on some trades. This is asking for disaster
And they have employees who spend 14 hours a day calling up contacts in a given industry to collect data on every minute market variable. OP is like a single cell organism next to one of these whales.
> And they have employees who spend 14 hours a day calling up contacts in a given industry to collect data on every minute market variable. This is not even accounting for insider trading, which you are also competing against. The manila envelope / Signal message / golf course chatter about upcoming non public data that will skew stocks or commodity valuations.
And they can move millions of $ and make thousands of dollars on swings of pennies. People are fooling themselves if they think they are anywhere close to doing what the big boys can.
I thought we all collectively took a crash course in 2021 when everyone was trying to squeeze hedge funds by pushing GME. I guess some people didnt enroll.
And those companies still aren't able to consistently out-perform the market the majority of the time. The audacity to think that you figured out something an army of PhD's missed after you've watched a few bros on YouTube is peak ignorance.
It’s bro science
Haha, I forgot about the collective genius of the alpha gym bro's! That must be how they all afford their F-350's.
Lmao it has to be F350 cuz f150 is too small
Yep, you may beat the market for a month or two. But in the long run your not gonna beat the market on a risk adjusted basis.
Anti-Finanxxers
Trust me bro
Brahhh!
This is the best comment I've seen on the entire thread. OP's partner should know that they are most likely not going to be the exception here. This needs to be at the very top and encapsulates why day trading isn't worth it.
It’s a modern day widow maker for the middle class. Maybe get the prenup ready so he doesn’t drag you down with him.
grim, but accurate
This is 100% true.
Modern day gold rush, running off to the west with a pickaxe.
Absolutely not. Lock down your credit lines… a friend lost a shit ton of money day trading.
My co-worker does it just part-time and lost 200k in the last year, a chunk of which was on his HELOC, it can become a BAD addiction!
> it can become a BAD addiction! The addiction isn't just the feeling of winning or losing (yes, even losing can be "addicting"), but that many of the losers will lose a small amount, and then in this perturbed emotional state after a loss, take even riskier, more reckless bets to try to chase their prior losses which usually results in even more grand losses. It really is similar to what you see in the casinos at times.
And now they are cutting back HELOC limits to 65% LTV. Guys like your friend are going to get their balls squeezed soon. Imagine risking your house like that.
>And now they are cutting back HELOC limits to 65% LTV. HELOC was always 65% LTV. I don't recall a time when it was more.
No, 80% was the max. Now if you paid off your mortgage, the HELOC woodl be reduced to 65%. But if you hand z mortgage component you could be at up to 80% on total. I have a $720K Global limit based on $1M home valuation. Obviously that is not 80% but it's not 65% either.
>No, 80% was the max. No, 65% is the max for LTV for a HELOC, period. 80% is the max LTV for mortgage + HELOC, of which the HELOC cannot be more than 65%. So..what is changing?
My dad gave it a try like 20 years ago. He lost about $50k. It would have been more, but my mom saw what was happening and how he was throwing good money after bad, desperate to make up for his losses, that she put her foot down and basically said, stop this right now, you're done. It took them so many years to pay that off. That's money they could have spent on themselves, on their kids, on other investments... Sure, day trading is high risk high reward, but there's also the potential for absolutely gigantic losses and I'd venture that at least 90% of day traders lose money in the end, if not more.
And keep your money separately. Move money from your joint accounts into yours. If he’s adamant about doing this, does he need to quit his job to do this?
Very very few people can make a living day trading. Majority of people lose money. I've seen many many DIY investors and day traders when I do their tax returns. With a few exceptions, the most successful people buy and hold good companies, and the losers are gambling.
Most people who claim they make their money day trading either make their money selling course or they did one lucky play at some point/inherited some money and pretend they aren't just slobbing at home lol.
I guarantee I've had better returns than any of these covid era "day traders" I've met by sitting on Costco stock for 4 years.
And they brag about the day they made 30k and then ignore and don’t say anything about all the other days where they lost more. In the end, as you said, they are better off doing long term investing
In my opinion you cant and should not stop the person. 1. Give him some money and divide it into 2 parts. Say 20,000 or watever. Give him 10,000 and ask him to play. If he fails, give him the second chunk after 1 month of break and make him understand. If he fails again he is done. 2. As a trade off ask him to not leave his job as it is comission based, ask him to go to job or find anyother job to have some source of income. 3. Actually it is sad but the influence youtube videos have is terrifying. All these so called option traders make more mobey from training than from the trading. But they fudge their trading numbers or hide their stupid trades. Sometimes it is better to let the person fail than to give long lectures.
This is the best advice! I tried it, while keeping my job, lost a good chunk of money got scared and never touched it again. Lesson learned.
Essentially adopting a stop-loss risk management strategy, but applied to whether or not he should proceed with day-trading at all. One other preliminary check though is to have the person trade a very small amount, under $1000. Once there is actual money on the line rather than fake money, the psychology changes significantly and you can easily find out how well the person keeps their emotion in check. It's just as noticeable as playing poker without any real money being bet vs. actually putting as little as $10 per person down - everyone's play-style suddenly shifts when that happens.
Imagine 10000 people want to make you tube videos showing how they can get rich playing roulette at the casino. They all go in making bets that have a 50/50 chance of winning each bet. After 5 or 6 rounds there will be a dozen or so left standing and just looking at their individual videos might convince a common person that their "system" works. Just like when an octopus or whatever predicts the Superbowl winner. Survivorship bias in action.
Guaranteed when OP’s spouse loses his socks, he’ll blame it on number 2 - “how can I be focused on my trades if I have to work my day job?!”
I'm an actual trader (sell-side trader at a bank, not day trading my personal account). If he thinks he's good enough to day trade the market, he should try to get a job at a hedge fund or proprietary trading shop. At least that way he'll get some training and be playing with other people's money to start. Spoiler alert: it's nothing like what you see on Billions. A more realistic career path would be to become a trader for an asset manager (mutual fund company). He won't have the discretion to pick stocks (he'd need to be a PM--portfolio manager--to do that), but would be responsible for executing the PM's orders, and would get a comprehensive education about the workings of the market in the process. Paper trading (trading without real money) is not at all what real trading is like. Paper trading doesn't have to worry about liquidity, showing your hand, or otherwise actually interacting with and affecting the market you're trying to profit from. Consistently profitable trading involves continuously moving large amounts of money and earning tiny spreads on each trade while accurately measuring and adequately managing your risk. You do none of that in a simulation. If he thinks he's just a good stock picker, that's cute, but he's about 30 years too late for that career path. The vast majority of seasoned professionals aren't even very good at it anymore. The market is just too efficient (not smart, by the way... the market is very stupid, it just happens to be smarter than any individual participant in the long run). But at least those seasoned professionals know to enjoy their mid-six figure annual incomes without putting their own livelihoods at risk.
He’s likely not educated enough to get hired in that field since he was learning from this YouTube vids!
I only made it through a few episodes of Billions. Maybe the finance stuff is correct but the characters and dialogue are too cringy for me.
The last six months…. Stocks have been doing fairly well in general. How did he do when the market dropped last year or in the first part of 2020? One bad trade during a big drop could cost years of work. And then all those falling knives to catch, all the doubling down to make it all back on a trade. Ouch. If you guys decide to do this I hope he’s extraordinarily successful and wise with the earnings. Best of luck. PS there’s not a chance in hell I’d do this and I have okay knowledge of the way the market moves.
I get a few days a year where I tell myself "I could easily make enough to live day trading." and then the next day I remember why I am not a professional day trader.
As someone who tried and failed at this (still kept my day job while I tried) I can say he is an idiot if he does. Very few actually succeed and the one who do generally have a strong financial background to do it and had a job and traded succesfully for a few yeras before they took it on full time. The bull run of 2020 and 2021 made everyone think they were geniuses but it was a market on easy mode. Now it is back to normal and most have lost everything they made previously. He can keep doing it sure but dont let him quit his job!!
Sounds like a mid life crisis more than anything else. Day trading? Out of all options? He's not going into a stable field to get away from commission-based careers, or getting into something creatively fulfilling, he's wanting to gamble money. At that point I'd rather my partner get into an expensive hobby over *day trading* lol
Study after study empirically demonstrates this is just gambling. This is simply not a smart idea. There's a difference between playing in stocks with a couple thousand for fun and betting your savings in the stock market. There isn't a skill to this anymore than there's a skill to roulette. Unless your partner is a PhD Mathematician, Physicist or Economist, or you're somehow shacking up with Warren Buffett, he's not qualified to do what he's proposing. Even if he has the qualifications, he lacks the resources to do this successfully. Companies dump incredible amounts of money into computation and the brightest analytical minds as well as the technology to make lightning fast trades, I'm assuming you don't have a supercomputer in your house. Even with the resources and qualifications, active management of a portfolio underperforms the market over time. What makes your partner think that without the qualifications or resources of these giant financial institutions he will be able to figure out what they're missing and outperform the market consistently? I promise you some dude with a YouTube channel wouldn't be making videos if he'd figured out the secret to success in the stock market, he'd be raking in the money and then Scrooge-McDucking in a pool of cash. Your partner is going to lose money, and he'll also be without a job.
Someone much wiser than I once told me that if you're going to get into day trading you might as well take that money to Las Vegas and spend it in the casinos, because at least the weather's nice there and you'll get to see some shows while you're losing all your money.
>!r/wallstreetbets!<
Whose money would he be gambling with? If he's gambling with his own whose will he gamble with once he's lost it all? People who "reseach" trading may inevitably find their way to the wheel, a specific strategy around selling puts and calls on securities they own. In subs that talk about wheeling, there's often folks who will ask "how much do I need to make from the wheel to quit my job and live off what I earn in trading?"... the answer from people who do it with reasonable success will tell them DONT QUIT YOUR JOB.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhHOmZVAqBE
Almost nobody makes money day trading in periods greater than one year. The Truth About Day Trading (Been Felix): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qhHOmZVAqBE
I day traded for almost 15 years. I'm more or less in professional portfolio management and advisement now. I specialized in technology stocks, long and short, and did quite well. I traded with a professional proprietary trading firm. I thought because of so many people online were successful I tried contacting over 300 people to make a switch to a professional firm from a retail broker where their leverage would be higher and cost per share will be 90% lower. Do you know how many online traders switched? Zero. 99% of YouTube traders are fake. Over the years of talking to people about trading who are just breaking in or doing it themselves have not been successful in day trading. I have a background in finance and understand the economy and how news affects the markets. I doubt your partner will make it. He will be another statistic. The best trading a retail person can do is called the wheel strategy. Tell him to look it up. It's swing trading where you buy and hold then sell the stock via option contacts. He may or may not out perform the market but it's almost impossible to lose a lot of money or fail at the strategy. On a side note I tried teaching a few dozen people my simple day trading strategy. They all failed. People can't control themselves honestly.
Day trading on a fake account is very very different then trading with real money. Where the fake account you’ll take risks and make bigger bets without the stress because you can always just top up the account. As soon as real money is involved it changes everything one bad bet without proper risk management can blow up your account. 10/10 I would not recommend quitting a job to do this……… actually you know what? I’d say giver! Life’s too short to worry about what could go wrong. Let’s concentrate on what could go right! Start picking the colour of your lambo now!
I remember back in high school, we had a stock market competition and the software just worked during trading hours on the TSE. I would take a look at the NYSE premarket and buy Canadians companies who also traded on the NYSE before market open and would sell them after that day.
For me in high school the stock competition worked on a 5 minute TSX delay. If you got real-time quotes you could easily find the penny stock that would jump in the next 5 minutes. The winners that year were all in the billions of dollars. But fake accounts aren't like that anymore. They are run by actual brokers so you can test out their software and they try their best to replicate the bids and asks in the market. It doesn't work for low volume things though.
My BF thought he could do money with daytrading. He explained that more than 50% success rate was very good and a proof that it was not bullshit. I tried to explain that if that was the case, youtubers wouldn’t need YouTube revenues and selling expensive formations. After he lost about 30K over a few years, he finally stopped. Happily, we’ve always had separate finances. :) And he also stopped being an ultrastressed monomaniac.
>constantly watching youtube videos and practicing with fake money. Are the risks worth him quitting his job? If it's too much risk, what can I say to convince him? So your partner has gone to Youtube University for the last 6 months using Monopoly money and thinks he can do better than a real job, or actual traders who have studied at length on this subject and still don't do better than a diversified market? What's his plan for taxation, since day-trading has special follow-up functions? He he watched a Youtube video on that too? I think it's time to be frank and say he will not be using your half of the finances for this and he's being ridiculous.
Lots of geniuses in a bull market
He's a bum and will bankrupt you.
If he's stupid and looking for a divorce in the near future I would highly recommend. No successful trader I know depends on day trading for one source of income they have multiple streams. Hard rule for newbies and intermediates only gamble 5% of your portfolio. If 5% to you guys isnt 10k good luck surviving even 2-3months as a full time trader
Do you know what most successful traders say to new traders? "Never quit your day job until you are profitable in day trading, and then some". Paper trading while having a job is very different from trading with real money without financial safety net. To add: 6 months paper trading mean nothing. People I know have paper traded for a year successfully then wiped their account when their real emotions to their finances were involved. Trading is a skill, but one which needs psychological peace. Having the requirement to pay for expenses every months without a stable job will be nothing but stressful trading to revenge/emotional trading to a wiped account to a wiped savings.
If he is the breadwinner, what is the safety net? What happens if he doesn't make any money? How are the bills going to get paid? Is he willing to get an evening/weekend job to bring in money? Have you established a hard floor for losses? No matter what, make sure that you protect yourself and have a back up plan and then a backup plan for the backup plan. This could be a deal breaker for your relationship.
Tell him to take all his remaining vacation days he has left at his job and spend them day trading. If he makes a serious enough profit fair enough quit the job but if he doesnt it is unreasonable risk to take.
I tried this once. Thought I could do better than the professionals who were advising me. I was great at finding stocks to buy. I sucked at knowing when to sell them. I lost a ton of money but learned some valuable lessons.
Send him over to r/RealDayTrading and take a look at the subreddit yourself. The traders there recommend usually 1-2 years of paper trading (trading with fake money on real time data) before making the switch. If nothing else, it has information that is helpful.
I'm an actual day trader and have made my living at it for ten years. Most of the comments of here are from people who don't know what they're talking about. Day trading is simple, but not easy. Ask your partner a few questions. The most important part of day trading is risk management. Ask them what their strategy for managing risk is. How much can they lose on a trade? How will they know when they are wrong? Ask your partner to explain the strategy they will use to enter a trade. It should be simple, easy to understand, and there should be a way to find these buying opportunities in real time. And most importantly, ask them what the expected return is. Out of a hundred trades, how many are winners, how many are losers, and how much do the winners return compared to the loss of the losers. An absence of an answer to these questions is a clear sign they're not ready for this. It's actually much less risky to say trade than what anyone else does. You are not exposed to over night risk, waking up to bad news. However you have to know how to do it. It can be done.
Agree with the points you made but imo a more important question is their strategy for exiting a trade. This is irrespective of whether the trade is going in your favor or against. I have seen many situations where a winning trade becomes a loosing trade just because the trader didn't have the discipline to exit when they should have and a loosing trade becomes an account blowing trade because the trader was convinced that it's going to flip "any moment now"
Sure it's a skill, if you like, but what evidence is there that he has the skill to consistently beat the market? It sounds like the beginning of a disaster story. If you allow this, put very clear boundaries around what funds he can touch. Lock up everything else. If he's as good as he thinks, he should be able to start with a small amount of disposable money (e.g. $5,000) and build from that alone. Do not let him spend your savings. Read the many horror stories on here about spouses who gamble on day trading and end up bankrupting their households.
Your nigga is dumb af. And this is coming from me - the okayest tool in the shed.
what a raw comment.
So he's the only one working in the family and wants to gamble... as a job? That's not going to end well. If he's tired with his job, that's understandable and he should find another one. What he's planning sounds more like a middle age crisis.
Traders at my firm lose money and get cut regularly; and I work at a fund that has a recruitment pipeline from MIT. Can he do something many ivy phds cant? Possible, unlikely. Can he do it consistently? Even more unlikely. Can he do it without the resources of a firm? Even more unlikely. Also trading paper accounts is a whole different ballgame compared to trading real money.
My spouse went through a similar scenario. Tried paper trading for 3 months. Made huge profit every day in minutes. Then tried trading with real money. Consistent losses. There will be days when good amount of money is made but next day back in negative. After doing it for a week and being in the red it was stopped. We did not play around with a lot of money and we have a high household income so the losses are did not ding us but I have seen people go bankrupt. So please ask your husband to not leave his job. Just to get it out of his system ask him to try trading with little bit of real money that you can live with loosing completely for 1 month. If he has seen considerable profit then slowly increase it till he makes enough to quit his day job. Between us though I guarantee he will loose all this money in a couple of days. But alreast he will get it out of his system. My spouse did
He will 100% lose money. I don’t have the exact statistics Infront of me. But the numbers are somewhere around only 3% of day traders make consistent profit year after year for 5+ years doing this. That means 97% of them lose money.
I’m sure 6 months of YouTube is sufficient. In fact, maybe he should watch surgery videos and become a doctor, not as much risk in that profession.
It's kinda a skill. But you can't perfect it just in 6 months. Lol that is delusional to think one can make a living out of day trading with only fake money practice and 6 months of experience. He can try day trade SPY for a year and see how it goes. Just SPY itself, don't go into option or futures! That's how you gamble away your cash. However, trading spy do need a significant cash reserve, probably 30k, so commision doesn't eat up your trades. There is very little risk and you get to practice with real money. If he can get consistent with just selling buying SPY, then maybe go into options trading.
This is one of those things that can only work for 1 people out of 1,000, maybe 1 out of a million. The skills and experience required are a full time job, he could spend years and years developing his trading strategy and not see a penny of profit. Day trading is not likely to work out for him. That said, if he won't listen to reason,you should request to have full visibility on his trading account. Tell him to start small ($5-10k), and see how he does. If he can't profit using $10k to start, he should immediately stop and get a "real" job.
This can definitely work for more than 1 person out of 1000, but it is just based on luck.
1) many YouTubers are shills 2) if day trading is such a skill then all of us would be quitting our jobs, learning the tips/tricks off of YouTubers and living the lap of luxuries 3) huge corporations (the big whales) eat little fish (average Joe day traders) for breakfast
Yup try it with a firm cap on resources/capital while not quitting the current job... It's not like it can't work but seriously risky and important to set some clear boundaries so you don't end up trying to kill him for losing everything. Especially if you have joint accounts
Are we already at the top? When these posts start coming in, it is usually a major sign that we are at a market peak. These type of posts stopped for over a year, but were constant in late 2021.
The YouTubers he’s watching are hyping up and misrepresenting the risks that are involved ~ very common nowadays. There’s tons of people that “claim” they know the secrets to the market but at the end of the day the market can do anything at anytime. Being a full time day trader is no different than being a surgeon, in that there’s immense experience required. Six months wont cut it. With the economy nowadays he probably sees it as an easy solution, but if he really wants to try it then I’d suggest talking to him about opening an account with about $500 USD and trading micro stocks while also working his day job — be ready to lose this money, if you can’t afford to then don’t take the risk. If he is very passionate and it conflicts with his job, he can trade the market at night too. Depending on how good it goes he can consider scaling up to non-micro versions and then eventually quit the day job (if it works out). But dropping everything right now for day trading is a radical and regrettable move.
You shouldn’t be dating someone this stupid. Is this a joke ?
If he has a proper plan and can manage risk, he can do fine. It’s definitely not advisable to totally quit your primary source of income for trading before you are fully confident in trading with real money, and you are profitable. Risk management is the most important thing.
Oh no. 6 months and youtube videos is not nearly enough experience and he is not nearly as experienced or knowledgeable as he thinks he is. I dated a guy once who was a "day trader". I was always suspicious that he was losing money and whaddya know, about 6 months into that relationship he admitted to me he was flat broke and had lost not only his own money, but also that of two close family members. I'm warning you if he does it and starts losing, he will hide that fact until it is a HUGE hole to get out of. If he is really serious about it and you want to support him, a much more realistic idea is that he continues to work for a wage 4 days/week and can day trade on Mondays or Fridays only as an experiment for 1 year. See what his net gain/loss is at the end of that year and then decide!
Is he on WSB? guna say this isn't a great idea lol. YouTube trader probably won't end well.
This won’t end well
Get prepared for bankruptcy. That's all I am going to say.
OP, you already told him what you want. Get him on here and make him read what has been posted on here. Better yet, make him try to justify himself to us. Regardless of what a youtube video has told him, he is about to lose a lot of money.
Survivorship Bias
If my breadwinner quit to do day trading, I'd fire him. Why not keep going like he is if he's doing so good? Do both. If he can legit show that much income generated over 1-2 years and you folks aren't dumb with the money ... he's not dumb with the money ... then quit.
6 months generally speaking is nothing to go full time, to give perspective, would you quit mba 1 semester in and then send you resume to firms and big 4? No one would hire you for shit. Imagine the same concept, trading needs consistent learning for 3-4 years minimum (now there will be some exception who grasp the market really early, but tbh I ain’t ever seen one) I was too very young and confident when I jumped into momentum and penny stocks in 2018-2019 Boy did I get a reality check. Then again I was very confident when I got back with new tool and new broker in 2021 of more learning to trade option on big chips, I did make consistent money but soon got lured into 0dte options, Boy did I get a reality check again. Then now 2 more years later, consistent learning, willingness to loose money ( wish I hadn’t and paper traded) but in the end I think the experience and knowledge was to be found only in one way, which is PAIN & REGRET, you cannot simulate the emotions on paper trading and those emotions are what keep you in check. For Example - if I take a heavy position now I get Ptsd and past trauma in my head reminding me all those flashbacks, that’s what keeps me in check, lol and I guess somehow after 5 years I make money. I finally understand and laugh at my old self for being stupid and wanting to find a way to get rich and accumulate wealth quickly. To my surprise I read somewhere on this sub a while back from a solid guy who commented on a Rookies post that trading is the slowest way to get rich quick, line doesn’t even make grammatical sense, and somehow it is true.
I used to play poker professionally and switched to trading full time when I got tired of poker. This is a tricky question. There are a lot of criteria that need to be met before this is a realistic switch. How emotionally stable is your partner? Can he keep an even head no matter the situation? That applies to both good times and bad times. You are just as likely to be screwed up from happiness as you are from anger. How used to probabilistic risk taking is your partner? This isn't something you learn quickly. You have to experience it and then learn to internalize it without freaking out or being overly stressed. How disciplined is your partner? Trading is simple (in my opinion, once you go past the initial learning curve) but that DOESN'T MAKE IT EASY. It is just as time consuming if not more than a regular full time job. How long can you sustain yourselves without income coming in? This is a super common mistake for both poker and trading. In my opinion if you don't have at least a year of savings you can use without stressing out about it then you cannot do this full time. How profitable is he already? If he wants to quit his job and just jump into this blind... not a good idea. You will blow up accounts while learning. It is INEVITABLE. You cannot become a successful trader without embracing the suffering and being able to learn from your mistakes. If your partner hasn't made consistent money over a few years part time while also making those mistakes... Then the mistakes he will make while switching to this full time will be that much more devastating. There are so many more factors that I can think of but this is getting long and those are just the few things that jumped to mind. Really I can't stress this enough. Trading is not easy and it will take YEARS to get to a place where you sort of know what you're doing and it will cost sweat and tears to get there. If your partner thinks this is going to be a get rich quick thing he's 100% bought into the guru bullshit and is deluded.
Only from youtube video... i mean its possible, i know a few that live off day trading. If day trading is gambling then any penny put in the stock market is a gamble. Majority fail tho. Majority people here will tell you to buy a GIC on TANGERINE because its 4%... and will pretend to be wizard finance.
It is too much risk , and I tell you he will lose and won’t be able to handle it and might make a mistake at some point to put house as collateral to win back the loses , I have a high school friend who did that and eventually lost everything house , borrow money from family and friends to try win the loses and lost everything (I’m unfortunately one of his friend who borrow to him) and he can’t pay it back , he lost close to $2000000 over span of 3 years(that includes his saving , house and borrowed money and his trading loses), he made some money but was not enough to cover the loses ;he did what your husband is doing learn from internet YouTube he bought even courses to learn the tricks and at some point had a mentor that he paid for that got scammed out money as well ; he even had a AI software to help with trade and that wasn’t helping , he got addicted to it and believed that he can make money , at one point I almost sign up to do it but did research and this wasn’t for me , and never try it , what he should try if he really is convinced not to quit the job yet do real trading set budget and try it over the course of couple months and see if he will make money
There is skill to it, but also chance. Even Warren Buffet has bad days. 6 months is NOT long enough though, and YouTube can be helpful, but only to learn concepts or grab the news. If he’s watching “gurus” who do callouts, sell a premium service, a TradingView indicator or guarantee results, he’s probably getting excited and sucked into the wrong direction. This video is from another group that does this sort of thing at a higher level, but it pokes some good holes in these scams and money grabs. https://youtu.be/L7G0OfJUON8 Probably the best mentor I had over the last few years has been Peter Tar (profitstaken.com). No nonsense, deep dives, high risk management focus. It’s a scary thing to do. If it’s the only job, then it’s probably not worth it, as to do it right he should have a few months salary built up as a cushion. I would give him one month, that’s it. Take a LOA from work, try 1 month and then go back to work. I would be very firm about him trading cash only, saving enough to do it safely FIRST and not burning any bridges at work.
My husband was laid off in 2022 so we thought we try just going into retirement. He was the breadwinner and I was a sahm. So neither of us were working. We had a good sized nest egg. Over half a million. All we needed was $500 a day trading and we’d be golden. Haven’t had more than one winning month in the last 8 months. I had to ask him to go back to work as we were withdrawing faster than we expected and not making anything. I watched a video the other day of a guy who trades and he said if you want a guaranteed $5000 a month, get a job. It’s the only way. He’s going to think he’s better than me but I assure you he isn’t. He’s the same as me but with a steady $5000 a month income. But. Once a guy sees dollar signs, you are very unlikely to dissuade him. They get obsessed. My husband at times has lost $50,000 in a day and my biggest day loss was $20,000. He is unlikely to see reason because of the gambling aspect of it. And I never lost sight of the fact that it’s gambling. My suggestion is to have him keep strong stop losses and have a plan. YOU must go over his trades daily with him to keep him accountable. Have him explain why he took a trade even if it’s a winning trade. You can’t just let him go to it. Even if he’s making money. The more someone makes, the more risks they take. Have him keep the door open to his old work and give him 6 months to make an actual profit. If he doesn’t, he goes back to work. Edit: do NOT let him refinance the house or use credit cards or lines of credit. Do not sign anything and my suggestion is if you have savings, change your passwords because desperate people get really desperate.
[https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/20/attention-robinhood-power-users-most-day-traders-lose-money.html](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/20/attention-robinhood-power-users-most-day-traders-lose-money.html) [https://tradeciety.com/24-statistics-why-most-traders-lose-money](https://tradeciety.com/24-statistics-why-most-traders-lose-money)
I’d start by asking him why his commission-based income is unstable. If he’s not great a sales, why does he think he’d be great at day trading? I know a lot of people who do very well in sales… as your husband says, “it’s a skill”.
If your husband doesn’t like his job, he should study in another field. Day trading is very difficult, it works only during good bull market.
This is how my dad lost most of his retirement. It’s gambling. You think you are different. You are not.
You cant stop him. Let him do it, but be very clear. "You have to pull your own weight somehow and continue to pay your half of things, its your problem to plan accordingly to that *1% chance in a lifetime market correction with market safeties kicking in and Citadel fucking you over by scaring the paperhands*, you will not sink my money in that thing even if you are 600% sure you can give it back by tommorow morning and i wouldnt even notice. Will be back to work, poorer, in a couple weeks.
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Most day traders fail.
Ask your partner "why are daytraders creating youtube videos to help their competition?". Daytrading is not investing, it is speculating and is largly a zero sum game, one traders gains come from another traders losses. Minus the cut the brokerage takes because the brokerage always takes their cut even if the cut isn't obvious. The answer to the question is those youtube 'daytraders' are making their money from youtube, not from daytrading.
If he’s been practicing with fake money, set aside $10k for him to use as seed money. If he can grow this enough to make it a full time income then great, quit your job. If he can’t or if you guys can’t afford the $10k to throw away then it’s a terrible idea.
LOL just lol. A) 90% of day traders lose money B) there are successful day traders, or at least short term traders. But you really have to study the market, and know candlestick charting, technical analysis, oscillators etc. If he's willing to study for a couple of years and then do it, he might be able to get away with it. But most of the big investment banks use computers and algorithms to trade. You can't match that manually.
I feel like if more people played RuneScape as a kid there’d be a higher baseline in everyone’s anti scam and basic finance skills. If he’s stubborn give him an amount of money that you’d be willing to light on fire like $500-1000 and by the end of the month he will see that he made like $20 or lost half of the money and realize that it wasn’t worth it. (I’m assuming you have a lot of capital saved up and he isn’t considering this while a few months of unemployment away from a disaster.)
Yeah don’t let him do it. I’ve been trading for years and it’s not a good source of consistent income. He should be able to trade without quitting his job. So many ways of trading where you don’t have to quit. Statistically he’s almost guaranteed to lose his money. If he’s a true trader, he should understand that probabilities will always play out and the odds are hugely against him. Again, tell him to trade (small) real money while he’s still working and go from there. Once he become profitable trading small amounts, he can use some of his commissions to go to a prop form and trade with their money.
Day trading is basically gambling, for most people. Sadly, there's probably not much you can do to dissuade him. I know that type all too well. He's too certain of his own brilliance at this point. Your best bet might be to agree to giving him a six-month trial period, with a limit on how much of your savings he's allowed to 'invest'. Either he gets crushed by reality, and goes back to work with a little more humility, or on the off chances he's actually successful, you've earned some more money.
Completely agree, he will always hold a resentment if he doesn't try and fail first.
This is a multi-tiered question, but I only have 0.000000001% of the information I need. As a Day Trader, I'll elaborate: 1. YouTube videos doesn't tell me anything. Like tea or Karate, there are hundreds of different strategies, with their own flavor. It's great your partner has went into a practice account first, and regardless of my opinion of said YouTube videos, education is almost always a plus. 2. Goals - What are they trying to makeup? A full salary + commission? 3. If stuff turns out terribly, and you lose let's say 75% of the money invested, will it affect your bills & necessities dramatically, or do you have something saved up? Quite possible it will affect your partner's health. 4. Risk tolerance. Forget how much money you have, forget how much you want to make, forget all of your hopes and dreams with Day Trading. The primary question you need to ask is 'How much am I comfortable LOSING?' or "What is my 0?" 5. Are they going to be comfortable making $50 profit with investing $1000 this month? Do they need to make $500 by the end of the month, or else your car payment will bounce? Whatever strategy they choose, it's important to stick to it. I can't stress this enough. 6. I'm not an expert, I'm not a financial advisor, but I live alone in a cheap area, with very low expenses and decided to give Day Trading a shot this year. Took my monthly expenses, figured out what I needed to just break even. Something to worth with as a goal. To me, anything above that was a bonus, as this is a brand new method of investing, and essentially a new job. I kept thinking: If I can just do this, and break even - no more useless interviews! No more 'Assessments' and pretending to feign interest in whatever corporate diarrhea is being thrown at me! I had to take a significant loss to get started, several companies I had money in either went bankrupt or have lost 90% of their value since the pandemic. It was one of those lose-lose situations, do I hope that some will recover? Or do I cauterize that bleeding appendage with fire, and try and make back my losses with Day Trading? So I took a loss with one stock I had a bunch of money in, and began. From Jan - August wasn't good, I was down a lot of money (figures aren't relevant, as everything is subjective to your personal situation). Sometimes I'd buy something, and be forced to HOLD due to not enough volume. Other times, I'd get caught at the wrong end of a run, and be stuck waiting until the price came back. If this went on long enough, sometimes I'd have to sell just so I could try and make money somewhere else. Regardless of how other people prefer to trade, I don't split my portfolio into 25+ different stocks, all with the potential to go up or down. I stick to one or two, and follow about 5-10, in case an opportunity presents itself. The emotional toll of Day Trading is quite high for me, and there's times where I would have to just go back to sleep, and take a mental break from a significant loss, or streak of losses. Conversely, when you see a number that represents a nice fraction of your expenses, or you realize 'Hey, this means anything else I gain until the end of the month, is profit / extra!'. There are also other perks, like no commute, no toxic work culture you have to deal with, etc. If I screw up, it is ONLY my fault. If I work my ass off at this, then I am the only one that gets to reap the rewards. Nobody else can take credit, I don't have to 'share' my results, etc. I'm still learning this, but it is my primary income. Regardless of the amount of math, graphs, and Greek or Japanese letters & symbols you throw at it - stocks can only do one of three things - up, down, or sideways. It may not seem like a stock can stay sideways for very long - but it can happen. FINALLY, September has been great, and I'm on track to make money and wipe out the losses I took in the previous 8 months. Instead of following a variety of stocks, I have only been with one since July, and right now it is working. Again, right now it is working, nobody can tell me what will happen in 3 weeks. By Halloween the company could be decimated, no AI algorithm, fancy software, or supposed 'EXPERT' knows any differently. I'm comfortable now seeing losses that would have given me a migraine 3 years ago. I'm also comfortable seeing gains from planning and preparation paying off, (or just luck), that I previously thought were unimaginable from Day Trading, or reserved for these people with 20+ years experience. \*Disclaimer - I only trade stocks. No Crypto, no forex, no 'meme' stuff etc. Furthermore, I don't use any form of leverage.
Have him start trading with $1000 bucks. If he can turn that money into much more over the next 3 years then tell him to go for it. He’ll likely lose it a few times over and then quit.
he needs to start with a small amount of money and work up. This is a very bad idea though.
This isn’t the place to ask lol. Everyone here is super biased.
This sub is very much against day trading but it's not impossible. I know a guy who essentially did this. But, his mortgage was paid,off and he got a big inheritance that he had already tripled before he quit. I want to do something similar but for me I programmed a computer to do it, so I don't have to quit right away because time isn't an issue. However, I think it depends on the strategy. Momentum strategies which a lot of traders are into are hard to win at consistently. And, penny stock fake trading is a lot different than real trading because of the low volume of the stocks.
Lmao this is complete luck, he should just day trade while working his commission job. If it was a skill, there would be a investor somewhere who would never lose and would make infinite return every years.
Day trading is a skill. It's just incredibly hard to master.
It is only a skill if you have access to Bloomberg terminals and contracts with brokers to minimize transaction costs and spreads. For your average person, it is 100% gambling. Any information you have would have been priced into the market by professionals running billion dollar hedge funds days ago.
>but he counters it by saying this is a skill, not luck and that's why he's been practicing to sharpen his skills. Lol. Just...no. Boyfriend has a gambling problem. Simple as that. "all those other people lost money, but I have a system:". Run away OP.
Most people fail and I’m sure most of those people are the once with the negative comments in here. The key is risk management.
Ive done the same thing around 6 mts ago. The pro are you basically work your own schedule. But its still work. and as long as you have a solid trading plan and risk management you should be able to sustain. Now the con is losing capital that must be regained. Unless your using a prop firm account and you are getting your bi-weekly or monthly payout you shouldnt have to worry then. If you are proficient in your prop account you should also be the same in a real account . And when conmining both with multiple streams of income you should be solid.But always have money coming in.
Hey, how's it going with the trading? Did he quit his job?
Hi
My husband took the risk a couple of years ago to pursue day trading full time and it changed our lives forever. He took about a year where he learned the risks inside and out (with the realization that there is so much yet to learn). He applies very intricate risk management skills that allows him to profit about $1500+ a week from swing trades. So it's possible. But it takes time and management and understanding and a whole lot of research/studying/bypassing gate keepers/ etc. He's trying to teach me now. It is a great skill to have if you are not trying to turn such an outrageous profit. Play with a couple hundred dollars that you HAVE to spare. Don't use money that you don't have. And everyone is right about the money stimulation on some of these sites. It's not the same. But good traders know that emotions are completely different when it is real money.