Why Day Trading Does Not Work: Wall Street Pro Reacts to Billions Season 2, Episode 5

The best decision I ever did was start day trading 9 years ago

It's possible to be profitable every Month with high performance strategies and sentiment. Your degrees don't guarantee you to know everything in life.

There are profitable trading methods for daytrading. We're profitable. Goldmans Sachs people can't trade. A lot of retail is better (though most still lose).

daytrading at best is very robotic, using the same processes over & over each day with no emotions over wins or losses. each day see what the market present to you, complete your process, and then shutdown your workstation and go about your day. If there is no high probability trade setup then don't trade. people fail because they overtrade, revenge trade, impatient, greedy, gambling or suffering from bi-polar or addiction. Our profession just exposes light to who you really are as a person.

bro said forget reacting to the episode im teach yall something

I day trade professionally for a living now. Futures /ES and /NQ typically 20-40 contracts on /ES. It’s not for everyone and idk if I could do it with equities

Just so u know … profitable day traders exists ….. I’m one of them ….. these hedge funds want to invest your money for u … learn how to trade yourselves people !!!!!!

I've day traded but not for the long run and most of my gainers have been in incredibly stressful high - leveraged etfs.

So, solid points and I fully agree.

Day trading up to 8 figures is possible, but at 9 figures and up liquidity becomes an issue so swing trading and position holding is then ideal in order to get fills and minimize slippage.

My dad day traided 10 years, worked

This spreadsheet screams a need for AI...

It is impossible. Day trading is the worst thing you can do with your money. Mid term and long term only. Never go above 3x leverage.

It's just a tv show. Give it a rest dude

nice infomercial for your book and website, you are not biased at all. Also, it is always fun to listen to someone talk about and compare trading 1000x bigger positions of SOMEONE ELSE'S money in a hedge fund and a day trader trading their own money for a quick small profit that can add up quickly to a nice yearly earning.

This isn't true. Plenty of long-term successful day traders. Plenty.

My question is . Who tf buys those stocks at their high points ?

how much did soros lose when he shorted the HKD in 1998?

Day trading don't work for hedge funds. However, it does work for retail traders!

I wanted to expand on a previous comment I made and provide more context, as I noticed there’s a lot of confusion about the advantages and limitations of day trading, especially when scaling capital plus there are questions about whether it's even doable.

Day trading is arguably the best ways to grow small amounts of capital quickly and aggressively, provided it’s done with discipline and control. For amounts in the range of 3 to 8 figures, it can be highly effective for compounding returns in a relatively short timeframe. Please don't confuse this with gambling.

However, once you start managing significantly larger capital (a higher 8-9+ figure), the effectiveness of day trading diminishes. I have friends who were generating extremely high returns while trading 6-8 figures of their own capital. Now, they run 9-figure funds ranging from $150 million to $700 million. At that level, it’s impossible to effectively deploy all the capital on your own. You need a team of traders to allocate capital across different asset classes. For instance, trying to risk even 5% of $500 million on a single trade would likely result in liquidity issues. It’s nearly impossible to get all that risk on the table in time before the move begins unless you’re swing trading or investing for a larger, long-term move.

This is one of the reasons why day trading doesn’t work well at scale. Larger positions often face challenges like slippage, wider spreads, and limited liquidity at key levels. These issues lead to worse entries, higher exit costs, and compromised RR ratios. Scalping or short-term swing trading with such large sums becomes almost impossible to execute effectively. Even if you do manage to turn a profit, the risk relative to the reward becomes disproportionate, which isn’t sustainable long-term unless you maintain an almost unrealistic win rate or streak of winning trades.

This is why swing trading and long-term investing become the go-to strategies as capital scales. These approaches allow for larger risk allocations without the constraints of tighter entries or liquidity issues. The longer time horizon smooths out the impact of entry and exit costs, enabling consistent returns without sacrificing RR.

Even institutions with day trading desks face these challenges. While their traders might generate impressive returns, the capital allocated to them is relatively small compared to the total assets under management, which means it would barely make a dent in the fund's overall return. This is why the larger the capital, the more the focus shifts to diversification, scalability, and long-term growth rather than the rapid turnover strategies that work well with smaller accounts.

In summary, day trading is an excellent strategy for growing smaller amounts of capital, but as your capital grows, you’ll find that swing trading and long-term investing are far more practical, efficient, and sustainable. Daytrading being a poor-choice has little to nothing to do with whether it works or not and moreso whether it's a practical approach for institutions but most retail traders won't face the same limitations as institutions until they reach 50-100 million under management or of their own capital. Therefore, if you can trade, I love indices, I only trade Germany 40, US30 & maybe US100 99% of the time and I've been doing this for the last 6 years & I'm preparing to do the first cap raise for my own investment fund & what I've learned is, what you trade doesn't really matter as much anymore, once you find a system that can be repeated, you can pretty much diversify across several asset classes but again, at a certain level, you'll need help managing those positions.

At large scales it doesn’t, for the average man who is working paycheck to paycheck it can. You haven’t heard of a successful day trader because by the time those people make it (if they do) they are no longer day trading.

This is all just nonsense. Woe be unto anyone who buys into what THIS guy has to say! Pay your dues. Learn HOW to really trade, including to daytrade. Yes it can be done. Naysayers always sing the same old songs of woe. I don't listen to any of these jokers. I EDUCATE myself! Yes, daytrading, or any trading, is not so easy. But it CAN be done very nicely. Take time to educate yourself before thinking it can be accomplished. The good news is that it CAN be accomplished.

I day trade. I place 750 trades, 180 days per year. It qualifies me for Trader Tax Status, which reduces my audit risk and taxable income on bad years.

I automated this on Interactive Broker. Futures contracts are cheap to buy on margin, so my core holdings are 6 month to year long holds, and scripts buy and sell the futures contracts. I dont care if my day trades make money, because they qualify me for TTS. I rarely pay more than $4k a year in income taxes.

And then I actively trade morningstar and seeking alpha picks releases. SA drops a bimonthly pick, and I wait for it like a hawk, buy in before the investors, and get out with my ~2%. Maybe later, their pick becomes part of my core holdings.

This is particularly effective when they recommend low market caps.

SMD, day trading isnt profitable. Gambling isnt.. Conflating the two is disingenuous. Stuff your candlesticks. Get familiar with market structure and the auction process. Develop a strategy and an Edge. Hone that edge.

If day trading didnt work, they wouldnt have algos making trades. Those algos are day trading

Day trading does in fact work for a small percentage of people with a system

It doesn’t work . Ok I’ve had 90 percent Green Day’s the past 3 months but yeah day trading can’t work ok .

How the hell am I going to save 23k every year?

Wouldn’t a market maker be a day trader?

A more correct statement is day trading is not scalable. It's because larger firms day trading have too much capital. If you have 1 billion dollars to invest, any significant trade on a smaller stock is going to take more than a trading day to liquidate.

Headlands Technologies, Hudson River Trading.

Two of the most successful hedge funds at present. Both HFT firms

Day traders don't exist?... pretty naive, especially for an "expert" lol

So how prop desks that mainly day trade make money? Trillium, SMB Capital, Apteros? Those are real companies that do day trade a lot? Lance Breitstein made, according to his own words, not only day trading but made millions just scalping.

Daytrading absolutely works and I’m a profitable trader. It is absolutely changed my financial life. I do trade longer time frames as I trade on four hour charts and I also compound by money by treating my brokerage account like a savings account. Deposit amount every week and I trade against it to compound and out perform the market. I’m profitable every month.

Day trading isnt profitable? Other than the millions of profitable day trades opened every day...

I day trade amd do great. Do i make 7 figures...no. but i have no desire to make that much. Just enough to not work and be happy 😂

I make high six figures every year day trading. I've done six figures in a month before, and on more than one occasion. Not much going on today , so I only did one trade and still made $3000.

I Swing and Scalp trade. I also have a separate long term account with a different broker. I work an evenings job for medical benefits and gas money. Taxes? I don't care because earning more per week and forking over the 21% still nets me higher take home every month. Is it hard? Yes, I research almost daily. Would I go back to a serious grind hoping for OT.... NEVER😮

I agree

Apparently u dont know Tom Hougaard . Seen him trade live . He is pretty good

I make about $250 daytrading by scalping momentum and imbalances. That adds up at the end of the year 😊

Bro so your telling me im not real? Ok what about Mark Douglas?

years into day trading succesfully........you have the entire point wrong. Successful traders don't actually predict anything. You make a small amount of profit on each trade when averaged out. This statement is repeatedly made by people that think they know the subject well but it's not how it works at all.

Bumpkiss

When this guy said "stocks go up or down randomly" I immediately know he hasn't traded his entire life. There's a thing called Technical Analysis dude. Look at Joovier Gems channel he will school you how to make money with day trading & also just because it's called day trading it doesn't mean you trade on a daily basis Jesus. Fake experts are really everywhere.

This guy thinks day traders hold for weeks? lmao. I hold for between 5 seconds to 1 hour. I'm profitable. This guy i'm sure is really good at his job, or was good, but he doesn't understand day trading at all.

I just remembered that this are US based traders that say day trading ain't profitable

Who said you would live those 20 years. The moment is now win now or loose now

Actually hedge funds do day trade, it’s the bots - high frequency trading machine. There’s a lot of half truths in all stories

Why would you want to do the stock market to end up with just 1 million? Seems like 401k and doing nothing can achieve that lol😅

in regards short term trading what about high frequency trading hedge funds, we have had quite a number of succesful hft funds in recent years, RenTech being a prime example