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I don't doubt the headline, but "We observe all individuals who began to day trade between 2013 and 2015 in the Brazilian equity futures market" seems like a weird way to come to that conclusion.
I've done ok trading stocks and FX, probably enough to live off. There is a caveat however; you need to have a sizeable portfolio to begin with. Otherwise, the risks you'll need to take are simply too large. If you think you're going to turn £5k into £500k in a year, forget it! But turning £5k into £5.3k is certainly doable. Scale that initial portfolio to £5m, and you can take home £300k with relative ease in a good…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because that is not a representative sampling of the day trader population. Assuming the techniques of the study were sound, at best we can conclude whether or not day trading Brazilian futures is a sustainably profitable undertaking.
Wouldn't you need a basis for believing that day trading Brazilian futures has unique properties not present in other markets to assert this? E.g. the volatility or spread is significantly larger than European futures or the information flow is more tightly de/regulated etc. Is there a basis for believing this?
The number of confounders you need to control for before you could confidently not make this assumption is staggering.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The interesting bit to me is, “we find no evidence of learning by day trading”. This implies to me that the top earners are merely lucky, and have no special knowledge or advantages.
We were taught explicitly in my (highly-ranked US) business school that stock performance is a random walk and success is luck.
I believe there’s some good evidence for weak form efficient markets hypothesis in the most liquid markets, which implies you can’t make money by trading only on ‘technical signals’ in the price. This is what you might expect day traders to try to do, so in that sense it’s not a particularly surprising result this paper demonstrates.
But the consensus is, I think, that the strong form of the efficient market hypothesis might not be true in real life - being good at fundamental analysis can lead you to outperform the market.
Illiquid markets are a bit different again - you can potentially get ‘paid’ a lot more just for providing liquidity to the market there, which is different again.
I've done ok trading stocks and FX, probably enough to live off. There is a caveat however; you need to have a sizeable portfolio to begin with. Otherwise, the risks you'll need to take are simply too large. If you think you're going to turn £5k into £500k in a year, forget it! But turning £5k into £5.3k is certainly doable. Scale that initial portfolio to £5m, and you can take home £300k with relative ease in a good…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The abstract of the paper seems to suggest otherwise: We observe all individuals who began to day trade between 2013 and 2015 in the Brazilian equity futures market, the third in terms of volume in the world, and persisted for at least 300 days: 97% of them lost money, only 0.4% earned more than a bank teller (US$54 per day), and the top individual earned only US$310 per day with great risk (a standard deviation of U…
But what should we compare those odds, how are we supposed to interpret this? Imagine we tracked a group of 1000 randomly picked individuals who wanted to be a brain surgeon. I don't know for sure but I wouldn't be surprised if of 1000 randomly chosen people, only 3 people managed to succeed at it after 4 years. But no one would ever say "Study shows it's impossible for an individual to become a brain surgeon." or im…
I've done ok trading stocks and FX, probably enough to live off. There is a caveat however; you need to have a sizeable portfolio to begin with. Otherwise, the risks you'll need to take are simply too large. If you think you're going to turn £5k into £500k in a year, forget it! But turning £5k into £5.3k is certainly doable. Scale that initial portfolio to £5m, and you can take home £300k with relative ease in a good…
Aren't futures contracts, by definition, zero-sum? The average profit should be pretty damn close to zero (ignoring/averaging across trades with non-daytraders).
Why can't the end users trade with each other directly and avoid such fees then? Often they are not in the market at the same time or want to trade different quantities, relying on the intermediaries to resolve these problems.
I've done ok trading stocks and FX, probably enough to live off. There is a caveat however; you need to have a sizeable portfolio to begin with. Otherwise, the risks you'll need to take are simply too large. If you think you're going to turn £5k into £500k in a year, forget it! But turning £5k into £5.3k is certainly doable. Scale that initial portfolio to £5m, and you can take home £300k with relative ease in a good…
Why bother day trading?