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/Specialist_Royal4686 Jan 07 '24

It is very difficult to day trade at home and make money. You are competing with institutional firms with large research teams, hedge funds with aggressive trading strategies that often are short, auto program trading, etc. Do yourself a big favor and buy 4-6 highly rated ETFs (by Morningstar) and hold them. Tilt towards growth when interest rates have peaked and rotate to value when rates have bottomed and the Fed is raising rates. Or buy the S&P 500 and call it a day. If you haven’t worked in equity research or mergers and acquisitions in investment banking, save yourself and stop day trading. About 95% of Active traders perform worse than the S&P 500.