I hear about friends of friends that made a killing day-trading during the dot-com boom but I haven't heard of anyone making any money at it in the last few years. One of my buddies went to a seminar and dropped $3,000 for a computer program that tells him what/when to buy/sell. It was worthless! He might as well have have used a random number generator to make his picks. Total loss of 3K. I think he roughly broke even on his day trading – some gains, some losses but the software was a total loss.
I have found that most people that talk about making a killing day-trading only tell you when they are right, and never when they are wrong. Although most people think they are professionals, most are not. There are probably a handful of folks that could probably day trade that don't work for institutions, but for the rest of us, it's not going to work. Either (1) we get to emotional or (2) we are out gunned by the I-banks or both. Also, one reason I stopped trying to day trade…. Pain in the ass end of year tax calculations even for my cpa.. It just wasn't worth the time for me, because I didn't personally do that well to really justify the pain in the ass things at the end of the year. If you think you're one of the handful of folks that can actually be successful, by all means try it.
