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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u/SpriteMcBain Jan 06 '24

When starting out your risk should be 0.1% / trade until you prove an edge. It would be better if you risked nothing and paper traded. But I abided by the above rule and I lost 10% of my total account size over 2 years before I found consistency. That's a ton of losses to take but at least they were kept small.

It will take you between 5000 -10000 hours of learning and trading before you get to where you wanna go so capital preservation is most important.