Almost 80% of Private Day Traders Lose Money
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Almost 80% of Private Day Traders Lose Money
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Re: Almost 80% of Private Day Traders Lose Money
#2Restricted to the publically-available data from one particular and rather odd site, but probably not crazy.
At first it seems counterintuitive, shouldn't it be roughly 50% gaining and 50% losing? But I guess that people typically put in a modest amount of play money, and then tend to trade until either they run out or get discouraged from losses.
Re: Almost 80% of Private Day Traders Lose Money
#3And the other 20% just lie.
Re: Almost 80% of Private Day Traders Lose Money
#4It's just slot machines with a more respectable coat of paint.
Re: Almost 80% of Private Day Traders Lose Money
#5If you think that's bad, check out forex trading accounts. I don't have the exact stats on hand but an insane percentage of them get completely wiped out.
I'm not talking about losing some of your money, I mean 100% of the money in your account and possibly owing even more.
Re: Almost 80% of Private Day Traders Lose Money
#6Restricted to the publically-available data from one particular and rather odd site, but probably not crazy. At first it seems counterintuitive, shouldn't it be roughly 50% gaining and 50% losing? But I guess that people typically put in a modest amount of play money, and then tend to trade until either they run out or get discouraged from losses.
I am sure someone will come here and say they have made their fortune from day trading, but every single person I know personally who has tried has lost a fortune. It is like lotto - sure someone wins each week, but nearly everybody loses.
Re: Almost 80% of Private Day Traders Lose Money
#7If you think that's bad, check out forex trading accounts. I don't have the exact stats on hand but an insane percentage of them get completely wiped out. I'm not talking about losing some of your money, I mean 100% of the money in your account and possibly owing even more.
That is due to the amount of leverage used in retail FX trding. Most people don't understand how leverage works, let alone the negative impact it can have on a trading account.
Re: Almost 80% of Private Day Traders Lose Money
#8eToro wouldn't be used by any remotely professional day trader. Most of those accounts are most likely idle and judging by eToro's target audience - highly amateur. Whilst majority of course loose money, so do majority of businesses in any industry, from startups to restaurants to hedge funds. The nature of human economics is such that there's more money chasing opportunities than the value of those opportunities.
Suggested reading: "Economics in One Lesson"
Re: Almost 80% of Private Day Traders Lose Money
#9I did it for a while in the very exciting year of 2008. I see-sawed back and forth and was profitable for months at a time, but in the end I was down. I strictly kept my daily losses limited at $50/day. So really small risk. At the end of that year my day trading losses were about $1500 and otherwise I was in cash just watching the world burn. My long term funds lost more than that in a day.
I've lost out on more money by not being in the market long term going up.
Of course I thought I might get good at it (everybody dreams), but the main reason I did it was to learn to confront fear and to keep logical and strict to the trading plan in the face of it. I am still risk averse though, so I didn't really learn thoroughly.
The other main thing I learned is that if you aren't a robot then you don't have any business out on that killing floor. The age of human day traders is over.
Re: Almost 80% of Private Day Traders Lose Money
#10If you think that's bad, check out forex trading accounts. I don't have the exact stats on hand but an insane percentage of them get completely wiped out. I'm not talking about losing some of your money, I mean 100% of the money in your account and possibly owing even more.
I'd love to see some references for that if you do find them (I'm not disagreeing with you, just would be interested to read more). That's been my impression of most Forex trading too, and I've seen people running 'Forex education' courses where style/bling and motivational Instagram quotes seem to be their main selling point. Forex is so highly leveraged that even if you have some degree of success, it seems easy to wipe yourself out with a bad incident or two.