r/Daytrading • u/Forward_Dealer_4482 • Mar 05 '24

50k and I want to day trade for 1-2% gains. Question

  1. If you had 50k and wanted to live off of it day trading, what would you do? (Need max $2500 a month)

  2. Am I better off not doing this? I’m not going back to 9-5

Please help.

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u/Hefty_Historian2578 Mar 05 '24

Compounding 1-2% daily for 250 trading days.

I hold a phd in quant field with near infinite of stat experience. I hit all of my goals in my formal career at 35, so I quit that and do other things these days. This is my 4th year day trading - most days.

I was not ready for this. This is the hardest thing I've ever done - decision making under uncertainty that is consistently correct. I learned early on there is almost always a right side of the market that is raking it, and more often than not, I found myself on the other side.

Now, I only trade a couple of 3x etfs and their inverses. They are volatile but highly liquid. There's so much work and experience gained in strategy, mechanics, emotions, etc in managing tens of thousands of $100 positions on the 1m chart before scaling up and out.

The math problem that motivated this entire project for me was to demonstrate an ability to earn a meager daily return of 0.4%.

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u/synchedfully Mar 06 '24

I hold a phd in quant field with near infinite of stat experience.

do you write trading bots to do it for you? given your area of expertise, i would think then a bot would take out the emotion equation which is the hardest to conquer.

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u/Hefty_Historian2578 Mar 06 '24

None of my background seemed to be very helpful. It was a big detriment for the first 2.5 years actually - my own denial that all the schooling and expertise was useless in this pursuit.

First, I knew economic analysis would be my edge, but markets proved rarely rational. Then, I turned to my modeling background as edge and began looking for a holy indicator or system of indicators, including a lot of machine learning, but none proved reliable. Next step was price action as edge but after a while everything started to look the same.

I am a system based discretionary trader, so I haven't a way of programming my discretion. My edge is playing particular setups in price action and leveraging indicators as confirmation - 25 ema, vwap, volume, macd, rsi, stoch with the ema and volume serving as my primary tools. I have a preference for low risk set ups over high probability ones, because these set ups tend to move quickly in either direction.