Can You Really Make A Living By Day Trading?

you can get 7 - 10 % annually by buying and holding
the vast majority of day traders lose money
virtually no one sees 50%+ returns consistently. if you were capable of that you would be rich already

totally possible, most cant do it.

It doesn't work like that dude. When trading illiquid assets like crypto, outside of the top coins, getting in and out with even a few k will move the market a few pips.
So you can imagine what the slippage will be when trying to move, say, a million dollars worth of coins.

That's not enough data to determine if you have a profitable system. I thought I had a profitable system too, then I almost round tripped.

this is 1 futures prop account i opened 1 month ago. theres others.

this is just some fucking crypto scam video

You’d need three good trades a year, each netting ~20%. Its much easier then it seems if you have some experience, a coherent and tested strategy for catching tops and bottoms, and aren’t prone to basic emotional mistakes in trading (panicking, overtrading, excessive fear or greed) etc.

Of course this disqualifies 95% of people.

aren't you the guy who was running a market maker bot?
i remember that equity curve.
i told you the drawdowns would fuck it up.
you can't trade that shit when markets trend (up or down). you need to gtfo when you detect a strong trend.

SAAAAAAR

getting good takes years.
literally 5 fucking years on average.
most people who become profitable in 1 year are unicorns OR, they are literally taken in and taught everything by a hedge fund or something. i dont know, never seen anyone like that.

becoming good is a bunch of suffering, mistakes, hard lessons, blown up accounts.
if you're a man with testosterone, then it gets even worse.
your fucking gambling demons may also slow down your progress.

you need to be stubborn as fuck, you need to do what the best do, if you dont know what they do, then you try to find out.

you also need to do the bullshit newbie stuff so you know what not to do. its basically an endless supply of lessons, pain and disappointments but the reward is sweet.
most of you will never get the reward.

if you want to gamble, you better go to a casino. you will have more fun

Yes, but your average joe will neve be able to do it. What separates people that can make a living with day trading and people that cant? Genetics, literally.

Yes haha I remember your comment.
But I only ran the bot until the first big drawdown, at that point I turned off the bot and began manual trading experimenting with different strategies.
Now I settled on a strategy which is trying to make $30 every day doing a combination of mean reversion, martingale and market making.
From now on I will only trade USDC pairs because they're commission free and I won't carry any overnight risk. I will decide direction but I will use a tool to place orders for me. I'm also experimenting with AI to try to advise direction but that hasn't been very useful so far.
Since I'm trading commission free I can make 0.01% from the spread on every order even if I get direction wrong, so it theory I should be able to get out of a drawdown just by repeatedly buying and selling as long as I don't blow up the account.
Eventually I want to fully automate this as well but for now I'm just gonna test it manually.

I'm south american

das rite.
the same way I can't become a pro football player or a formula 1 driver, the same way most people can't trade.
its really simple.
if I still insist on becoming a pro football player at age 40, then people will think i'm crazy and rightfully so.
you can do trading until you're old though except most people just dont have the faculties for it.

Why would I gamble on a game with negative EV when I can gamble on a game with positive EV?
With commission free trading and limit orders I'm expected to make 0.01% from the spread every time I buy or sell on a coin flip.
If Binance stops this promo I'm gonna go to MEXC which I believe also has commission free trading for makers.

where is it commission free?
USDC pairs on binance or something i suppose?

Yes, USDC pairs in futures. In spot they offer the same promo on FDUSD pairs.

i'm saying this to the average person.
i dont know how average you are or not so, you can ignore that but most people are just not cut out for it.

the funny thing is that the same people, under the right conditions would definitely learn. in and of itself its not the hardest in the world, its just that most people never pass the threshold of superior understanding of what to do.

if instead, they got hired by a bank or hedge fund, then they would learn those things but since they are on their own, they can only depend on themselves and that is where the dog squeals more often than not.

its not fucking magic. there are people who make money when you lose and people need to understand who these people are and why they win and what they do.

To be fair, one reason they make money is because they have deep fucking pockets.
Look at the recent MOODENG pump. How much do you think they spent on pumping that? Probably hundreds of millions of dollars.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to press the buy button a million times to liquidate shorters. I imagine the most complicated part is getting out of that huge position while minimizing the price impact. How do you think they do it? I suppose they sell slowly and buy back if the price drops too much, and also long spot and short futures maybe, timing their buys and sells to avoid paying the funding fee.

Can i buy your market maker source code? Ill pay handsomely

You don't want it, I stopped using it for a reason.

my bet is that the really deep pockets don't even trade this shit.
they literally can't get in and out without fucking everything up so...

so, i dont think they spent a dime on this. this is me vs you vs the other millions of poorfags and mini-whales.

crypto is still one of the least liquid markets.

Memecoins.
I can make about $40ish per trade with just $200 (1SOL), I say my winning rate is about 70%. so It's not so bad.
I use AXION Pro, with the filters 40% max, bundlers, top holders, dev, insiders, marketcap of 9500min and liquidity of $10,000min.
I only buy coins that have at least 80+ more buyers than sellers, $2500k total net volume and the chart moves up and down real fucking fast and I mean fast dude, don't buy coins that are slow, just the fast ones that go red-green-red-green real fast., I have set a takeprofit at 24%, sell slippage at 60%. so it fills within seconds when the chart moves fast.
Also, only low marketcap coins, because those are the one that are easier to get that 24% in seconds, big market cap coins at 1m will take forever to fill that 24%.
I scan axiom pulse page all day and I follow those rules to the letter,I still lose money from time to time but it works most of the time.. Some days I can make $500 in a single day, some days I get lucky and can make over $1000.
trade only during US hours.
papertrade for a few days or weeks. make an axiom account and apply my filters on the final stretch and migrated tabs, don't bother with the new pairs, you're just gonna get rugged there.
shift+click on the chart to open the measure thingy and you can then move it around, try to simulate your entry point and see how fast it takes for you to get to 24% profit, papertrade for a few days.
Also, you're going to need at least a few thousand dollars to get started, because you will take loses, somedays I trade like 4 coins get 4 wins but then i get 4 loses in a row that's just how it goes, you can't win every time which is why you need money to keep trying, don't ever fomo all your wallet into one coin thinking you will turn $5000 into $10000000, it can happen but most likely you're going to get rugged, only do that if you have like $30k to play around.
memecoins are great but Anon Babble hateem which is why you hardly see people doing it here.

I guess, but for the cabal the lack of liquidity is part of the strategy. If the liquidity was so deep that they could dump half a billion dollars and the price rose 5% and quickly retracted to the original level then they wouldn't make nearly as much money as they do if the price raises 500% because of the lack of liquidity.
The question of "if I buy X amount and then sell X amount in an illiquid market how much money will I make or lose" is a fascinating one but it takes a lot of money to research that question.
If you can find a way to make the price impact on the way out lower than on the way in, it's an infinite money glitch.

at some point, you will understand that on the Internet, its best to play dumb.
i will never disclose anything of what I do and I actually prefer if people assume everything I say is a larp.
crypto is really a mmo poker or something.
everything you say can be used against you especially now, in the age of AI.
the Internet has become a small house crammed with lots of people.

for every person that says something there are 10 thousand who do the same thing but never say anything.

deep pockets love plenty of smaller orders to pass under the radar.
retail loves one big fat order.
when retail goes in, you see volume spikes.
when deep pockets goes in, you don't see it.
being seen is a pre-requisite to being hunted down.

you should be able to make $30k from $50k trading on 2x leverage in year, maybe even less than a year. I made $12k from $2k in a month when I first started but I was taking huge risks and sleeping with one eye open.

but really. its more like yin yang type of shit.
when retail makes a spike, well, someone obviously sold or bought from them.
whales need retail to feed off of or else they just can't play

Insightful post, anon
Have a genuine (You)

I think at this point when it comes to pattern recognition and purely predicting the markets AI is probably already better at it than any human, and the real edge nowadays is in market reflectivity, i.e. studying how your actions affect everyone else in the market, since researching that requires either data only the exchange has access to, or burning a lot of money. Although with DeXes it might be feasible to study some aspects of it using public on chain data.

You won't get anywhere unless you backtest systems and refine them until results beat your own reasonable metrics, when something beats metrics collect the tickers and timeframes put them into a list, set alerts, watch for signal decay below metrics, watch for overfitting - things are tradable then quickly decay upon trend change if overfitted, pay attention to sharpe ratios. I wasn't profitable day trading until I did this.

trump can pump dump whole market if you get caught up in wrong side it's pretty much over especially if you're trading with leverage it' is trump meme market

Yes, I had a feeling when I put a big limit order close to the price, they would fill it and then drive the price against me to shake me out of the position. I also thought it might be paranoia, and doing these kinds of experiments to get a statistically significant result gets expensive fast, which is the market reflexivity thing I was talking about. But I also tried to make a bot that bought a big amount at the bid and sold it at the ask. Theoretically it should make the spread every time it gets filled but in reality it somehow consistently lost money, I think for the same reason, the algorithms used by the market makers noticed the big order and consistently moved the price to make the opposite leg of the trade execute at a worse price.
I've been thinking about these kinds of market fingerprints for a few days now, for example this is me warosu.org/biz/thread/60284310#p60312729
That is why I made the execution tool. It repeatedly puts small limit orders at the bid or ask to scale in and out if a position unnoticed. One weakness is that the size is always the same so you can tell if I'm buying or selling by seeing that the bid or ask grows atomically by x amount every n seconds. That's why I want to randomize the exact timing and amounts but I haven't gotten around it yet, it should be an easy fix though.
Binance has a built in TWAP order/bot, I bet it might be detected and front run by other market participants.

(Front run or squeezed)

They hunt for liquidity; the market maker is not hunting your $5 position. The price will go where it is supposed to go; you simply have no control over it.

i doubt its personal. i doubt they are tracking your exact amounts to fuck over exactly you.
i bet you are simply doing whatever it is that thousands of others are doing too and they just cast a huge net and they got all of you at the same time.

but you need to do what you need to do, that is how we learn. just make sure as you already pointed out that its not expensive to do so.

look. if binance literally offers you some tool then you can be pretty sure that someone is countertrading that exact tool.

Another strategy I think may work is pumping the price for a few minutes then waiting till someone puts a big order in the book that allows you to get out with a single market order at a profit. That might be one of the reasons for the behaviour I was seeing.
Another interesting thing I noticed is how the major coins (eth, btc, sol, xrp etc.) have wild swings in the depth of the order book, while low volume coins don't have as much fuckery. I'm not sure if it's spoofing or people trying to get filled as quickly as possible without outright crossing the spread.
I want to make an order book heatmap software to try to reverse engineer other people's behaviours more easily, as well as think of ways to visualize time and sales data.

Market maker literally get paid to actually make the market so average joe's algo bot isn't going to be profitable otherwise they cracked where price will be going in future.

Day trading is just one of those fake things people do to pretend they're busy. There's no reason to make more than 1 trade a day MAX even when actively trading. What the fuck are you doing there staring at charts for 8 hours a day pretending to work
I bet you'd make more money if you just made 1 (UNO) trade a week. Stop trying so hard, it doesn't pay

They weren't $5, I was purposefully experimenting with big orders on low liquidity pairs to see how my actions would influence the market.
For example this was one of my experiments i.warosu.org/data/biz/img/0603/16/1746570054955621.png
Ultimately I didn't find anything terribly useful but it was interesting nonetheless.

you seem young. its good that you experiment program whatever you feel like.
there will come a point when enough time will have passed where you will need to make a decision.
this decision will require you to summarize everything that you have done, filter out the profitable ideas and remove the non-profitable ideas, distill the good stuff into a plan and stick to it.
i'm getting too old to experiment and that is why i'm saying this.

to settle on something of course, you need to have tried a hundred different things so you know what is good and not.
i'm sure that you already know stuff that works more or less that you just kind of put on the side and started researching other shit.
never forget the stuff that you put on the sideline. you may come back to it. don't get lost in rabbitholes, most of them don't make any money. go back to the ones' that do and develop those.

that said, that doesn't mean that research just stops at some point.
what i mean is to do any further research, you must have a core strategy that you follow already and make money with. it can't be perfect because nothing is perfect, just it needs to be dependable. when you have your core strategy, you do that, you don't tell anyone about it and you can play around with other shit but never sideline the core strategy because you are overly curious or some shit.

this guy is smart

Liquidations sounds a bit too dramatic, I guess it's stop orders or momentum bots or simply somebody getting out of the opposite trade, but sometimes pumping the price triggers "something" in the direction of the trend, and sometimes it doesn't. But at some point if you keep pumping the price, people who had an opposite position and a smaller wallet HAVE to get out one way or the other.
Then the problem becomes getting out before the price mean reverts but also without impacting the price so much that the trade becomes unprofitable.
In those experiments I did, sometimes getting out with a single market order meant getting out at a loss and sometimes it meant getting out at a profit . Which is why I think the impact can be minimized by getting out at the right moment, when there is an above average amount of liquidity in the order book. And vice versa for getting into the position, when getting in I think slippage actually works in your favor, and it that's the case you want to get in when liquidity is below average.

honestly, trying to compete with market makers on their own terrain is probably not going to end well.
but you might have to satisfy your curiosity before you actually move on to something more worthwhile.

i know the feeling though, being obsessed about some shit only to drop it later on. i've lost count of the times the same process was repeated.
in the end, it was all for the good even despite the lost money. at least i know what i will not repeat.

Just get a job. You need money to even make money.

So what's your PnL? Do you trade stocks or just crypto?

What do you mean exactly by market maker?

just use x100 leverage and be right 11 times in a row, bro.

Anon, i...

You have no idea what you are talking about. I started with 1k and became a millionaire.

Remember ALPACA? That one was particularly interesting because the funding fees were crazy and all the shorters were forced out of their positions when the token was delisted from the futures market.

just assume i'm a larp. thats how i prefer it to be anyways.

the guys taking the other side of taker orders.
if you are doing maker orders then you are technically doing the same job as they do, especially with that bot of yours.

there have been cases of market makers having to get bailed out because they got in such deep trouble.
since they are so important for the market, they got bailed out.

problem is, no one will bail you out.

Which ones have been bailed out? I love wall street lore.

you dont have an M

What’s the obsession with day trading? Just swing or simply actively manage your own book. You really have no excuse if you have even an iota of edge because options are heavily skewed in your favor. 65% of being correct with a pay off of 3 to 1. Most people mistake is they think they have an edge, but they don’t.

set conditions for edge to manifest

place fixed amount in trade

define exit parameters

As you said, trading isn't for weak-minded normies, but you can surely compound to a million in less than a year with enough dedication and some luck.

cope

How long it took you to reach a mill?

i must have watched a documentary about the 87 crash
i think it was one of those "specialist firms" who work on the floor, basically market makers.

Keeping the Markets Open: Lessons Learned from the 1987 Market Break

Thursday, November 1, 2007

sechistorical.org/collection/programs/Transcript_2007_1101_MarketsOpen.pdf

investopedia.com/terms/s/specialist.asp

my memory is dodgy

day trading is a scam for insider traders

~2years. Peak was much higher when link was $50.

picrel is probably what i remembered.
you had these specialists (mm role) which when out of cash get lines of credit.
normals like you and me, dont have lines of credit and so, its risky as fuck especially in crypto.
no one will bail you out with a line of credit was my point.

this is from the pdf i linked in the previous post.
its full of lore.

Many of the NYSE specialists reportedly tried to lean against the wind and support their stocks (though others apparently did not). The SEC reported that many specialists were heavy buyers early on Monday (SEC Report 1988, p. 4-9). However, as prices fell and the position of many specialists deteriorated, they started to lose the ability to continue to defend the stocks they were assigned (Brady Report 1988, Study VI, p. 42).

federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2007/200713/

again, imagine being retail emulating market makers, in crypto...