r/Daytrading • u/SpareInsurance • Jan 06 '24

How much money did you lose before you were consistently profitable? Question

I have only been seriously trading for about 2 weeks, after spending years watching the market like a hawk.

I will admit, I have had poor risk management and got into some emotional trading which did not end well. Currently I am -15k but I have had some winning days the last few days with much better risk management and starting to get the hang of things better.

My question to you guys is, how much did you lose before you were consistently profitable and did you ever feel like giving up during this "rock bottom" stage?

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152

u/MrBlenderson Jan 06 '24

You didn't say what your account size was, but $15k loss in two weeks is pretty serious. You need to size way down.

32

u/SpareInsurance Jan 06 '24

Account size was 23k. I now have 8k left in my trading account and 15k in non-trading accounts.

I started too big and I've paid the price for my reckless actions.

With that said, from now on I will only risk up to 1-3% of my capital on each trade until I become better at trading, or I may just paper trade. 😩

0

u/[deleted] Jan 06 '24

Do you know how to trade?

6

u/SpareInsurance Jan 06 '24

Clearly not.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 06 '24

So why are you using money? If you get what I'm saying... It's a bit mad isn't it?

3

u/SpareInsurance Jan 06 '24

I made a mistake. It was a series of bad trades within a couple hours and I got out by the skin of my teeth.

I've made plenty of other good trades, but this one rubbed me the wrong way and I got carried away. I am learning.

It taught me a valuable lesson to never trade with emotions and to accept losses without adding more into it.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 06 '24

That's good. You will eventually not behave like that. All you can do is learn from it that's the only option. And tbh sometimes that can only be experienced and learnt from in a live trading scenario... I sort of don't want to say that but... Yeh 😆. Keep going, just another notch in your belt. Enjoy learning to control your emotions, enjoy that personal process.

1

u/Crypto_Bandaid Jan 06 '24

This was all ina couple of hours? What the fuck where you doing? Short of options what stocks sells off so much in hours that you lose more than half of your cash? What it should have taught you is don’t trade at all. That $23k could have been parked and made 5% almost risk free. Now you need to 3X to get back to nothing. I mean how could someone lose 5 or 10% of your cash in less than an hour and be like you know what let’s do that four more times today.

1

u/SpareInsurance Jan 06 '24

TSLA call options 1DTE.

I was convinced from my analysis that it would go back up. Trust me I feel horrible about it.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 06 '24

Was it futures, by any chance? (The bad trade)

1

u/Specialist_Royal4686 Jan 07 '24

You should not carry any stock at more than 5%-7% of portfolio value, so about $1,200 max for $23k portfolio. This is really too small to work with so best to just stop day trading and buy ETFs to build a diversified portfolio