Ditto to be a professional horse gambler which I remember seeing a programme on 30 - 40 years ago
Not actually relevant, then!
the comment was directed at
Sorry, there are so many people raising incorrect and irrelevant tidbits, I try to put them incontext.
Just as an aside are you a millionaire yet, are we talking about trading in the £100s, £1000s £10,000s
Fair enough, some background/précis you'd find lacing through the thread, repeated here to save you wading.
Way back near the start of this thread, I showed the result of putting lumps of money into separate bank accounts - they were fixed interest things you couldn't add to, so the numbers were clearer inseparate accounts.
Startng at 20k, I got to 300k then 500k or so within - I can't remember, a small number of months. I showed the bank accounts on the phone screen. That trajectory continued. When the trading account gets to a something over about 80k I take the excess off and stick it somewhere else - like one of those fixed term accounts. I often wonder what would have happened if I'd used more, but there are limits and things get complicated. I'm pretty lazy...
My trading llimit was based on the 85k secured limit, but that's not particulary logical. Now I use a variety of platforms,
I use ISAs obviously. They're clunkier. You can't "short" as such but can use negative or positive 3x or 5x etfs.
The whole project was to make enough to cover potential old-age costs for both of us. "Homes" cost a lot. eg 1500 up for a week, so the aim is 2 x 1500 x 52 x some number of years - like 10 or 20 is/was a general target.
The other prompt came from when I saw the "growth" of our various pension funds. They seem to think that a couple of percent, after their greedy fees, is good for you. Bucking fowler hat brigade. The Scene is still inhibited by them.
A gentler approach is what's called "swing" trading where you buy near the low side of an ongoing range and sell at the upper edge. Case in pont is the FTSE a couple of years back. A tracker fund would have gone up about 2%, but the index had risen and fallen several times, several percent each time. The total moves added up to 25% iirc, but even with a sloppy approach, selling when it started dropping away from the upper edge, and buying after 3 weeks of rises, would have returned say 10% on the year. I have one isa where that's all I'm doing. If you sell, you're still getting 4+% from the uninvested cash. I have too many accounts so tht happens, but at the moment Barings German Growth and a European one Artemis Smart GARP , are doing well enough. The daily return is around 0.5%, (360%pa) so not sustainable, hence the need for stop-losses. Another one has defense stocks in ETFs, because of the news. Large overlap obviously.
To repeat from way back, the starting method was to look at BItcoin. MARA is a platform for bitcoin trading, and they're a miner. When bitcoin goes up, MARA goes up several times more.
Then you can leverage MARA , times 5.
So BTC woud move maybe 1-2$ in aday, Mara would move 6-12% and leverage then x5 gives you 30-60%, in a day. Quite often it then goes back down again, so once you've gone short you can get the same again. So yes, a few days come out over 100% up. Some of the energy commodities were helping because ther leverage is 20x .
I found the gains pretty astonishing, I have to say. More recently the market has quietened, but there are many days like yesterday. Having TraderTV (Youtube) makes it all very much easier. They make a daily view, with all sorts of news stuff , then they give a list (sticky note) of suggested trades. You only need one or two, usually. You can only put money in one place at a time.
It's a routine,, they're doing the clever stuff, not me. One understands it, though.
Get a "paper" trade account and try it. Trading 212 isn't great but would do and it's all free. eToro is no good for day trading, for me, far too clunky, etc etc, T212 is run by a bunch of Bulgarians, but they have the approvals, fair range of stocks and ETFs etc.. There are loads of others, all free. There are plenty of people like AJBell, Fidelity, Interactive investor, HSBC etc to stuff larger amounts.
A good book to read is "Trading in the Zone" (free pdf online). It's only about the psychology, which is the hardest part. The nuts and bolts you'd pick up watching traders, they do a lousy amateurish educational bit to boost their youtube income, but it's ok. There are many others I could name, buttthere's no single book on how to day trade. The Dummies one on Swing trading is OK. I have some older ones, which are pretty hopeless, they're out of date. A lot is out of date, like 20, 40, 70 years out of date.
There's loads of detail but I hope that's enough to paint the picture..
Oooh look at ABercrombie and Fitch shares. Ihave some of those..... I think....