So You Want to Be a Day Trader

Richard Dobatse was a Navy medic in San Diego. Steady job, family, discipline. In 2017 he downloaded a trading app to make a bit on the side, funding it with $15,000 in credit-card advances — and later, chasing losses, two $30,000 home-equity loans. At its peak the account touched a million dollars. It ended at $6,956. "When he is doing his trading," his wife told the New York Times, "he won't want to eat." What stayed with the reporter wasn't the loss. It was that at every stage, Dobatse believed he was one adjustment away.

One adjustment away is the engine of the whole trade. The apps feed it, the courses price it, and thirty years of data measure exactly where it leads.

The Record

97%

of Brazilians who day-traded index futures for 300+ sessions lost money. Regulator records of all 19,646 who started 2013–15. Just 1.1% out-earned minimum wage.

<1%

of Taiwan's day traders were reliably profitable after fees — the whole exchange population, fifteen years.

74–89%

of retail CFD accounts lose — the range EU regulators found before restricting the products in 2018. Brokers now print their own, similar figures.

−6.5pts

a year: what heavy trading cost the most active US retail investors versus simply holding the market. 66,000 households.

45%

more trades placed by men than women — earning less for it. Single men: 67% more, worst returns of any group.

Who wins

The machines. Citadel Securities paid about $2.6 billion across 2020–21 just to trade against retail orders — two-thirds of it for options flow. Nobody pays billions for the losing side. When you day trade, this is your opponent.

The house. Brokers earn on every trade, win or lose. That's why the apps have confetti and streaks. Zero commission didn't make trading free. It made trading more free.

The teachers. Courses, signal groups, prop-firm challenges that live off failed $200 entry fees. If the edge were real, nobody would sell it for $499.

A sliver of traders. In Taiwan, the consistent winners were a fraction of one percent — about 4,000 out of 450,000 in a typical year — big, fast, and largely profiting from everyone else's mistakes.

The market doesn't punish stupidity. It charges for confidence, per trade.

The scoreboard

Set day trading beside everything else you could do with the same money. Two pictures tell it.

What each path has actually paid

Annualised nominal returns, 1928–2024

Geometric averages, pre-tax, pre-fee (Damodaran, NYU Stern). *Housing is price appreciation only — no rent, no costs. Professionals don't escape the gravity either: hedge funds averaged ~5% a year over 2011–20 while the S&P returned 14.4%, and the heaviest-trading retail investors in the Barber–Odean data gave up 6.5 points a year to the index.

Odds of coming out ahead

Share of participants who end up in profit, by path

*Every 20-year S&P 500 hold since 1928 has ended positive in nominal terms; the worst returned about 3% a year. Pro funds: SPIVA year-end 2025. CFDs: ESMA 2018 (range across brokers, 12-month windows). Day traders: Chague et al., Brazil. Different markets and periods — the shape, not the decimals, is the point.

III

The case for the defence

A fair hearing, because the pro-trading side has real evidence — and it deserves better than a strawman.

Skill exists, and it persists. The same Taiwan data behind the grim headline found about 4,000 traders — out of 450,000 — earning reliable profits net of fees, year after year. The top 500 averaged strong daily returns with statistically significant persistence. This is the only large study to document individual-investor skill that survives trading costs. Winners aren't a myth; they're a small, stable class.

The classic studies are dated. Barber and Odean's subjects paid 1990s commissions and 1990s spreads. Today commissions are zero, spreads are compressed, and wholesalers give retail orders price improvement inside the quoted spread. The cost drag that ate those returns is a fraction of what it was.

Some samples look far better than 97-lose-3-win. A study of 1,386 US direct-access traders found roughly half were net profitable after commissions over the sample period. And Boehmer et al., in the Journal of Finance, showed retail order flow predicts returns — retail is not pure dumb money.

Verified winners exist in public. The US Investing Championship audits real-money accounts — Oliver Kell posted +941% in 2020. Prop firms have paid traders hundreds of millions in withdrawals. Kotegawa was real. The right tail is not empty.

Now the honest weighing. The skilled tail is under one percent of participants, and the Brazil critique — narrow market, beginners only — runs into the same result appearing in Taiwan, the US, and Europe across four decades. Lower costs shrink the drag but don't create an edge: post-2020 studies of app-era traders still find underperformance. The half-profitable sample covered 68 trading days at a professionals' broker — self-selected survivors in a bull quarter. And the championship proves what nobody disputes: that the best exist. The defence establishes that day trading can be won. It has never established that the average entrant should expect to win. Both things are true, and the whole argument is about which one describes your brother.

The education aisle

Teaching trading is a better business than trading. The current menu:

Warrior Trading (Ross Cameron, ~2m YouTube subscribers) — $797–$3,997 one-time. Settled with the FTC in 2022.
Timothy Sykes' Millionaire Challenge — ~$5,000+, application-gated; alert services from $75/mo.
Investors Underground — $297/mo or $1,897/yr. The one independent reviewers rate most highly.
Bear Bull Traders (Andrew Aziz) — $99–$199/mo. Best value for structured beginners; much of it mirrors Aziz's $20 book.
Humbled Trader Academy — ~$1,290/yr. Reviewers note no proof of the instructor's profitability since 2021.
Udemy et al. — $15–$200. Variable quality; some titles promise "95% win rates."
Prop-firm challenges (FTMO, Topstep, Apex) — $49–$540 a try. Pass rates run 10–20%; roughly 7% of buyers ever see a payout.

Now the receipts. In 2022 the FTC ordered Warrior Trading to pay $3 million over false profit claims — its investigation found the "vast majority of customer accounts actually lost money." Online Trading Academy, whose packages ran to $50,000, settled in 2020; $9.8 million went back to 31,000 customers. Raging Bull paid $2.4 million — it had kept no records of whether customers made money at all. In 2026, forex-education MLM IM Mastery Academy settled after taking in over $1.2 billion.

So which course is best? None publishes audited student outcomes — and where regulators forced the books open, the students were losing. If your brother wants to learn anyway, the honest syllabus costs about £30: Aziz's How to Day Trade for a Living (~$20, most of his paid curriculum), Adam Grimes's free full course, Brett Steenbarger's free blog and books on trading psychology, and a free broker simulator — thinkorswim or Interactive Brokers give away what some courses sell. That's half a percent of a flagship bundle, with no evidence the $4,000 version does better.

Real lives

Takashi Kotegawa — "BNF"

The Legend · Tokyo

Turned $13,600 into roughly $150 million in eight years, trading from his bedroom on instant noodles. In the 2005 J-Com fat-finger error he made about $17 million in minutes. The catch: obsessive hours, near-total isolation, a slower era — and by his own account, no idea if he could do it again. Someone wins the lottery. That isn't a plan.

Richard Dobatse

The Round Trip · San Diego

Credit cards and home equity in, a million on paper, $6,956 out — around $860,000 lost in all. The shape matters more than the size: early wins that felt like skill, bigger bets that felt like conviction, losses that always felt like the last ones. The Brazil study found the same shape in the whole population — traders got worse with experience, not better. The learning curve doesn't exist.

Navinder Singh Sarao

The Winner Who Lost · London

Made about $70 million trading US futures from his childhood bedroom in Hounslow. Genuinely gifted — and charged over the manipulative orders US authorities linked to the 2010 Flash Crash. While he awaited trial, fraudsters took nearly all of it. Even at the far right tail, the money found a way to leave.

Jesse Livermore

The Archetype · New York, 1877–1940

Made $100 million shorting the 1929 crash. The uncredited hero of Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, still every new trader's bible. He also went broke three times and died by his own hand, the fortune gone. Traders read him for the tactics and skip the ending. Both are the lesson.

Alex Kearns

The Warning · Illinois, 2020

A 20-year-old student trading options on his phone. One night the app showed him a negative balance of $730,165 — an artefact of a half-settled spread, not real debt. Support was an email queue. He took his own life believing he'd ruined his family. He owed nothing. The lawsuit settled; the industry rebuilt its options screens. This is what changed in the 2020s: amateurs now get institutional leverage with consumer guardrails.

A note on that last story: money trouble looks biggest at 2 a.m., and Alex's debt wasn't even real. If losses ever start to feel like more than money, telling someone — a friend, a professional — works better than any strategy on this page.

Why men do this

Not stupidity. The research says something more forgivable.

Overconfidence. In "Boys Will Be Boys", men traded 45% more than women and earned less for it. Women won mainly by trading less.

The thrill. Finnish researchers matched trading records to speeding tickets: sensation-seekers trade more. For many, the pulse is the point.

A casino in a better costume. Clinicians now see excessive trading present like gambling disorder — the slot-machine reward schedule, chased losses, hidden statements. But a man at roulette is a punter. A man with four monitors is a trader. Same brain, better story.

The story itself. Fire your boss, beat the market, provide. Social media supplies the proof, pre-filtered: winners post screenshots, losers delete the app. The feed is a graveyard with the headstones removed.

Seen this way it isn't idiocy. It's a well-built trap for smart, driven, slightly bored men.

VII

If you'll do it anyway

Fine — run it as an experiment. Fixed budget, hard rules, honest scoreboard. None of this makes the odds good. All of it caps what the answer costs.

Ring-fence a pot you can lose. Never top it up.Treat it as spent, like a casino budget. The one rule that survives your own psychology.
Risk 1% per trade.A long losing streak dents the account instead of ending it.
Hard stops, set before entry.Orders, not intentions. Every blown account died holding and hoping.
A daily kill switch.Down 2–3% or three losses: closed until tomorrow. Revenge trading is where accounts die.
No leverage, CFDs, or short-dated options.Those 74–89% loss figures are these exact products. Cash equities only.
Paper trade three months, with a journal.If practice can't beat costs, live money will do worse.
Count every cost, including hours.Most "profitable" day traders earn under minimum wage once their time is priced.
Benchmark against doing nothing.Each quarter, compare with the same money in an index fund. The index never tilts — and beats over 95% of traders.

Put the serious money in boring index funds. Let the itch play out on the small pot. Six months, full journal, quarterly benchmark. Beat the index and you're in the rarest percentile, with receipts. Don't — and the record says you won't — and the question got answered for the price of a holiday, not a marriage.

That's not defeat. That's the cheapest good decision in finance.