Day trading from home

£highflyer

Is anyone into day trading as a part time/full time career. Also is it possible to do this from home and any recommendations on platforms for trading.
I am hoping to start and have a very good amount to get me going.


Thanks in advance

racing_blue

The book "Free Capital" by Guy Thomas profiles a number of successful private investors, IIRC one of them was a day trader. Talks about methods, etc. Might be of interest to you?

The point is also made that there are probably unsuccessful twins, not profiled.

£highflyer

Thanks for this, will look into it. I have used dummy accounts in the past but really eager to do this full time.
Have a few weeks off now so a good opportunity to give a good go to see how I get on trading real money.
I understand day trading is riskier but it makes sense doing it full time.

bowlhead99

It is possible to do it from home. If you have £200k bankroll then making only 5% profit on that over the course of the year (over and above what you would have made from simply investing the money) is £10k, which some people live on. Of course if your lifestyle is such that you can afford to live a year on that £10k, then you might feel like you are in a world of pain when you lose £50k in a bad month.

Good luck.

JohnRo

bowlhead99 wrote: »

Of course if your lifestyle is such that you can afford to live a year on that £10k, then you might feel like you are in a world of pain when you lose £50k in a bad month.

Simple, just double down to win it all back the following month... what could possibly go wrong.

£highflyer

I was thinking along the lines of 10k starting balance, and aiming to steadily increase this on a daily basis. I was just wondering what would be a simple platform to use as a beginner

droopsnoot

Have a bit of a search further back through this forum, there was a discussion about a television programme (last year I think) on day trading with some of the ins and outs. It appeared to show people making a good income from it, but as I recall all was not quite as it seemed.

redux

JohnRo wrote: »

Simple, just double down to win it all back the following month... what could possibly go wrong.

Even before you said that I was already reminded of that scheme for roulette, betting on for example red and doubling after each loss.

I watched for a while the one that comes on ITV late at night, pretending I was betting £1, then £2, £4, etc.

Apparently you could make about £10 an hour there in otherwise idle moments, until you had 10 or more losses in a row and lost nerve or ran out of cash in hand when the stakes were doubling in the thousands.

And they might ban such betting patterns anyway, by having a maximum stake.

I haven't joined.

eskbanker

£highflyer wrote: »

I am hoping to start and have a very good amount to get me going.

£highflyer wrote: »

I was thinking along the lines of 10k starting balance

I'd have thought that £10K would be something with which to dabble for a bit of a flutter rather than to build a career in this area! How much of a £highflyer are you in total though?

BLB53

I was just wondering what would be a simple platform to use as a beginner

IG Index is probably the market leader in the UK. I have used them in the past and their platform is really good - however, after a couple of months, I decided to give it up as a bad job as I found it difficult to consistently make a profit. (I now hold their shares in my income portfolio!)

Good luck!

noggin1980

redux wrote: »

Even before you said that I was already reminded of that scheme for roulette, betting on for example red and doubling after each loss.

I watched for a while the one that comes on ITV late at night, pretending I was betting £1, then £2, £4, etc.

Apparently you could make about £10 an hour there in otherwise idle moments, until you had 10 or more losses in a row and lost nerve or ran out of cash in hand when the stakes were doubling in the thousands.

And they might ban such betting patterns anyway, by having a maximum stake.

I haven't joined.

martingale system, I came up with the same system as a niave teenager without knowing it was already a thing, I worked it all out on paper before doing it, worked out how many times I could lose in a row and the odds of that happening and it of course comes out looking really unlikely.

What I stupidly didn't work out was how this super unlikely event actually becomes really likely over time, toss a coin 10 times and the chance of getting all heads (on a fair coin) are 1 in 1024. Really unlikely, toss the coin for a few hours or days though and it eventually becomes almost guarenteed to happen.

So of course I learnt the lesson the hardway and lost a few hundred quid.:D

All thats a bit offtopic though really.

On Topic, I'd stay away from being a day trader, it's not very likely to work out for you.

If you want make a few grand go and have a go at matched betting, thats a nearly completely safe way to make a little extra pocket money and should scratch the same itch as day trading I'd think without the risk.