Comment by jnsie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jnsie | Hacker News Reader

Like many other people who should know better, I tried my hand at day-trading. I bought some course by someone who in hindsight I'm certain made more money off selling courses than they ever did off of day-trading. I got my account setup, had enough funds to allow me to trade short timeframes (I forget what this was called but there is a rule where you need X amount of money before you can do more than Y trades in Z timeframe) and was excited to trade short and long equities. I had some success and some failure with fees effectively eating my profits. I used to do my scans at night to know what I was planning to look at upon market open where there tends to be a lot of volatility and (I'm sure if you knew what you were doing; I didn't) opportunity. One morning I was certain that Boeing was going to plummet so I shorted a very small number of shares and was glued to the screen. I placed my market order, it hit, then Boeing immediately ripped upwards. Now, if you've traded you know that the difference between going long and going short is that going long you can lose everything you invested, going short you can lose everything you own. For about 3 seconds - my heart pounds when I think about this - I hemorrhaged money. I was down a couple thousand dollars before I could hit the key to cover the short at a huge loss (thinking back I know I had a stop loss but am not sure why it didn't trigger. Presumably it was a limit order and the price jumped the bid pre- and post- spike; I don't know). Right as I went to cover the stock dropped back down, as quickly as it shot up, and I ended up making maybe $500 on the trade. My last ever trade. I withdrew my funds and closed my brokerage account immediately thereafter.

There were so many learnings it's hard to know which is the most important, but I know that I am not cut out to day trade, I know that shorting is a fools game for (most?) non-institutional investors, I know that if it sounds too good to be true ("day trading will make you rich!") then it is and I know that even people of regular intelligence (I'd be average give or take) can do really stupid things. Never again. Never again!

I had some success trading a long/short stock portfolio, but on longer time periods than day trading (holding positions from few weeks to few months). The fun lasted almost 3 years. Then I shorted META from 300 to 100 and felt on top of the world, it was after shorting a bunch of other "covid success stories" like zoom, moderna, carvana, and making 50%+ return on each in a reasonnably concentrated portfolio. The rest of my portfolio was doing ok as well.

As META kept going down I kept adding to my position (meaning shorting more), and then it came back up. I ended up a loser on the position despite being up almost 70% at some point. I couldn't believe in a recovery for the company.

I then thought "never again" and started to trade options so that I would have a more disciplined, guaranteed stop loss. I lost more than 50% of my margin that year and another 50% 6 month later, so I was back below square 1 at the end of it all. We are talking small numbers (maybe losing 15k in total) but an amazing amount of time and energy spent doing all this which generated a lot of stress.

> We are talking small numbers (maybe losing 15k in total) but an amazing amount of time and energy spent doing all this which generated a lot of stress.

This was roughly my experience too. Stopping after the above trade meant my total losses were not huge (relatively speaking; maybe $2000) but I put an incredible amount of effort into it and the stress was huge. I don't fully regret it because, frankly, it was very exciting, I had a lot of fun and it was extremely interesting trying to predict the ebb and flow of the market and the psychology behind moves.

> [...] I know that shorting is a fools game for (most?) non-institutional investors, [...]

Any kind of active trading in public markets is a fool's game for non-professional investors.

Active trading in something obscure enough that the professionals don't bother might be exempt. Eg think trading Magic The Gathering cards in the 1990s.

You might still lose money doing that, but at least you have at least a theoretical chance to make money trading on a risk-adjusted basis.

Of course, the more obscure the market, typically the smaller the scale. So in the end your gains might just look like an hourly wage for your effort, instead of return on capital.

I did a short-lived attempt at day-trading 15 years ago. Bought a few tens of thousands of NFLX, NVDA, and AMZN. Sold it all maybe a week later and made a couple thousand bucks, which I thought made me pretty smart.

I'm curious as to why you stopped (feel free to tell me to mind my own business!)?

Ha. The real question is why I didn't just hold. That $50K would now be like $10 million.

Been there with longer term trades. Bought some DXCM back in 2014 and sold later for a small profit. Was trading at $8-9. I used their continuous glucose monitor (am type 1 diabetic) and was certain they would be successful. Sitting at around $115 a share right now.

I used to get upset by things like that, until I realized that everyone(-ish) has a similar story.

Still, it's amazing that for all the hours of work I put in, day in and day out for years, I could have amassed 10x more money if I had just done "nearly nothing" at a couple of key moments.

Same. I'm the guy who would have order Bitcoin with pizza, guaranteed.

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