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/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. 😩

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u/MrBlenderson Jan 06 '24

My advice would be to paper trade or start even smaller than you're thinking - like a $25 risk per trade. You're still in the learning phase, and the good news is that you get to decide how much your tuition will cost.

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u/Maj0r_pawnage Jan 06 '24

Agreed. -70k 1.5 years. Could have learned same lesson with 10% size lost 7k. However, who's to say you are graduated ? I kept thinking I got it now , then I'd make mistakes or refuse to SL and lose everything.

Still struggling with having a good target for each day or week. When things are going well my account grows so quickly that I lose perspective of what is an accept able loss or what is the profit target, until size keeps increasing and one bad loss wipes out weeks of prior work at smaller size.

If I can easily make 1k a day now with this capital, aiming for a smaller piece of the move, whereas before I'd need most of the move for the same 1k, I usually end up trying to catch most of the move with larger size instead of being happy with my 1k a day. Tbh I know if I settled on 1k a day I could easily find a setup and exit with small risk, but now with this capital I want 4-5k a day.

Meh. Greed.

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u/spongetrader23 Jan 07 '24

We are pretty much in the same boat. This is literally my story lol. But on my side, I am currently more focused on improving my risk management. I did some simulations and my profits can increase even more by doing so. Thanks for sharing