Originally Posted by Adraco

Four periods of my life I've actively daytraded, as a profession, meaning sitting by the computer from Asia mid day till New York closing. It get enormously boring after some time and all you can enjoy is the little profits here and there, read, read, read and follow the tickers, then short trade, and more wait, wait, wait, read, read, and read. I have been quite successful and been able to live off it, buying apartments and cars that way but I wouldn't recommend it. I become almost obsessed and numbers and percentages and profits are the only things I care to talk about when in that state. Not a very nice or fun guy to be around.

Part of my philosophy was to always keep a few shares from each trade. Say that I bought 1000 of stock A at 5.00 each, during the day it might go up to 5.15 or hit even 5.25 and then I'd sell them. But not all of them. I might keep 10-20 shares from each trade. Those were later transferred into a more long time portfolio, collecting dividends and so on. And I was always very fast at cutting my losses more than 3% down, and everything was sold at once, as a general rule of thumb. Part of that portfolio is still sitting in a structured product, locked away and paying out some dividends today.

If youre going to daytrade, get an office and be around people. It's too boring to just sit at home, waiting, reading and so on. Then you start to trade just to activate yourself, and then you loose money and rack up high transaction costs. But I wouldn't recommend daytrading to anyone, unless you have a huge financial interest, knowledge and some spare cash laying around that you can use as working capital. It can be done, but it's very hard to outperform the market in the long run.