How much does a successful day trader typically earn?
Payments
Asked by Question Bot11/Jul/20131 answer
1 Answer
F
Faisal Khan
Answered 11/Jul/2013
As a full-time day trader for about a year and a half, trading in commodities like Sugar and metals like Gold and Silver, the income was very decent (around the GBP 80,000 per year). This is circa 1989/1990. So today, presumably you can make more, much more or less.
Initial days were bad. Quite bad. However, I did have an advantage, as not only was I a day trader, but I was working for a brokerage company. Our company was associated with a very large brokerage firm (Shearson Lehman Hutton at the time), so market intel and research coming out was solid and not available to many (pre-Internet days). So that helped tremendously.
Self-research can bog you down, and information overload is extremely easy. I've always associated day trading to playing poker. You have to be very patient and play a few hands a day over the course of what may seem 1000s of opportunity - moving ticks on the graph. The goal was to understand, never be greedy. Keep emotions in check, and remember, you cannot make money every single day, but you can limit how much you lose.
Back in my days, the brokers I used to work with, we had a rule. 50-30. 30 basis points up - you exit and book your profit, and 50 basis points below your buy price, put an automatic (standing) order to sell. Don't take the basis points literally, it is the concept that was more important. If for example trading Gold, a $3 upwards climb, and we'd be out. But a negative $5 dip, and we'd sell. That was the discipline that was practiced at the time. The timings used to suck, because I used to play both the London and Chicago exchanges, so had to endure a long trading day.
Initial days were bad. Quite bad. However, I did have an advantage, as not only was I a day trader, but I was working for a brokerage company. Our company was associated with a very large brokerage firm (Shearson Lehman Hutton at the time), so market intel and research coming out was solid and not available to many (pre-Internet days). So that helped tremendously.
Self-research can bog you down, and information overload is extremely easy. I've always associated day trading to playing poker. You have to be very patient and play a few hands a day over the course of what may seem 1000s of opportunity - moving ticks on the graph. The goal was to understand, never be greedy. Keep emotions in check, and remember, you cannot make money every single day, but you can limit how much you lose.
Back in my days, the brokers I used to work with, we had a rule. 50-30. 30 basis points up - you exit and book your profit, and 50 basis points below your buy price, put an automatic (standing) order to sell. Don't take the basis points literally, it is the concept that was more important. If for example trading Gold, a $3 upwards climb, and we'd be out. But a negative $5 dip, and we'd sell. That was the discipline that was practiced at the time. The timings used to suck, because I used to play both the London and Chicago exchanges, so had to endure a long trading day.