Day Trading For A Living - Is This For Everyone?

By Peter Skonctuedt

If you mention day trading for a living to someone who has never traded before, you can be rest assured that they'll immediately ask you why there aren't more people doing it if there's really so much money to be made.

Now, if people asked this question because they really wanted to find a proper answer so that they could learn more about it, then the question would be perfectly acceptable. However, the vast majority of people who ask this question only do so in order to find a way out of actually becoming involved. If however you are sincere, then you need to be advised that there is one huge misleading factor, and that factor is the frequent use of the word "invest".

In plain and simple English, generating an income by day trading for a living has absolutely nothing at all to do with investing. To the contrary, it is trading, and the two have very little in common.

While there are certainly high risk and aggressive investments one can make, they all deal with the notion of holding onto the investment for at least a short while. (Conservative, long term investments will be held for significantly lengthy periods of time.)

Unlike investing, day trading for a living doesn't involve trying to hold onto your cash. In fact, if you're day trading for a living you need to be buying and selling on the same day, and no matter what anyone has told you, it's not an easy process. Of course there is plenty of money to be made with day trading, but there's also a chance that you could end up losing a great deal of money.

To answer the original question, this is why so many people do not embark on day trading for a living. It simply is not for them and there is nothing wrong with such an assessment. Some people are just more cut out for the world of day trading than others.

Furthermore, you need to bear in mind that day trading for a living can involve huge amounts of money, and a tremendous amount of effort. This alone is enough to put many people off.

On the other hand, if you have enough confidence to trade, then day trading for a living can without a doubt prove to be extremely rewarding from a financial point of view. Bear in mind that there are many people who have become millionaires, although they are admittedly few and far between. The bottom line is however, many people have started out poor and become rich along the way, and it's by looking at them that one can become inspired.

Contrary to what you may have heard, you can start day trading with a very small amount of money, and in fact, this is actually advisable, irrespective of how wealthy you are, so that you can first gain some experience.

No, day trading for a living is certainly not a good choice for everyone. If you feel that you're simply not cut out for it then you'd be better off avoiding it altogether. If on the other hand you find the idea of day trading appealing, then of course you should at least give it a try, because after all, the truth is that you could very well end up making a huge amount of money. - 31987

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