Anyone stopped day trading dreams and just started steadily investing?

99%.. The rest keeps going because of sunken cost fallacy. 0.001% make it

We all did it at some point, then were humbled and realized the best way is just index investing. Good on you to recognize the gambling tendencies, consider the $2.5k the cost of learning the lesson. Some people lose WAY more before they learn, some people never learn.

I live out my day trading fantasies with like half a percentage of my entire portfolio. It’s a good thing too because I truly suck at it.

Yes, as in most adults who will actually have bank when they retire

Try to invest with an eye on where things will be in ten or twenty years, not where they’ll be later today. Share prices swing up and down in the short term; the value of profitable, well-run companies grows over the long term. Try to keep an eye on that value, while ignoring the share price.

Me with futures trading right now. 2 years of constantly buying eval accounts and resets just to only take $5k in payouts, despite easily spending more than that on resets and new accounts. I actually haven’t taken a payout at all this year as I’m ready to quit manually trying to trade. I could have easily had at least $5k in my savings and who knows how much in an actual investment portfolio if I didn’t waste all this money trying to day trade.

6k: 3k spcx 3k ttw sell after Thanksgiving:)

Pretty much. I still hold some bitcoin, I still will buy an occasional leap option, but I realized the small amounts I was gambling with were not enough to change my situation so it was kinda pointless. Definitely not good enough at it to go full port 😅

An an options seller, thank you. Keep it up

I never started. And even if I did start, I wouldn't gamble with more than 10% of my portfolio.

I buy "long hold" stocks and avoid looking. I found when I tried to do day trading cause I was terrified of being broke when I got older I made horrible choices and ended up selling when I should have held. Now I just invest, have DRIP turned on and leave it at that. I will guage how I have done in 20 years

Not really, I've actually been trading more as I become more skilled at timing and options. Made 30k last 3 months by betting on AI bottoms. Made 10k earlier in the year by betting against natural gas, and made 10k by betting on oil. All these are small percentages of my portfolio though, so risk/reward. I just used more options to bet against natural gas again on Friday. Overall +70k on various options trades for the year, excluding investment gains.

I made a few good plays and tripled my portfolio, then lost it all on stupid plays. Luckily it was only a few thousand(ignoring the potential gains). It was fun, so I can see how people blow their NW doing it. Hard pass on that.

Yep. Day trading is extremely hard, there's a lot of fish (institutional and quant traders and algos) in the sea and you're a small fish. More likely than not you get eaten alive. Even longer term stock picking is just tricky as hell to pull off consistently over years, even with a quantitative approach, because market regimes can and will change and invalidate your (likely thin, if even there at all) edge. You have to know a lot about the current macro environment and where it seems to be headed, and how your stock picking methodology is going to interact and react with the macro environment. If you get caught flat footed and fail to adapt, the broader market will likely outperform you. Its like that bell curve IQ meme, in the middle are the *retail* day traders/stock picking investors/quant investors (professionals are a different story), at each end are the retail folks that just do index investing.

When I was day trading a couple years ago, I was taking my daily profits and moving them to another account for investing. And I pretty much stopped with margin rates peaked

Yeah, I’ve lost 20k since June from options so I’ll probably just stop and stick to good ole VTI. 😬 At least it was play money

My portfolio is about 95% ETFs and 5% stocks. Every once in a while I’ll buy options and regret it just to remind me why I don’t. I used to be almost 100% individual stocks, then I got older and realized the stress and research weren’t worth it. You make 20% on one and lose 10% on another or you can buy ETFs and just consistently compound with far fewer fluctuations.

When i had a couple of my option contacts assigned, I realized that holding on to the underlying equity is probably the better option for me.

Yeah I’ve made life changing money from long term investing. Day trading I’m negative overall.

Most stocks lose to the S&P 500; I saw that first hand and decided a few years ago that if I’m comparing stocks to the benchmark…I should just buy the benchmark.  I have too much shit going on in my life to fuck around with stocks, and I suggest everyone to live a similar lifestyle. Fill your life with hobbies  and vibrancy and ignore the market. The only way to win is to invest in tenure.  I have an auto invest into voo every other week, and end of the year I max out all my retirement accounts with ETFs. Its good to stay up on the news, but stock picking is for hedge funds, not regular ass dudes like me. 

I work for one of the biggest financial investors in the world and we have access to the best deals and spend hundreds and hundreds of hours on due diligence for each deal, and still get it wrong enough that we don’t out perform the market by that much. If you think there are day traders out there CONSISTENTLY out performing the market by a significant degree, that is just confirmation bias. You need that to really sink in and realise that what you are doing is genuinely no better than gambling at a casino

Yes, pretty much everyone. Youth is great because of your optimism, among them believing that you can beat the market and that everyone else who can't is dumber than you. But reality eventually catches up with you. That is why you find beginning investors day trading and experienced ones long term investing in the boring index fund market. Sure you will find people telling you differently, but I have a surprise for you. People always lie about their investing ability and returns, telling you about the wins, and conveniently forgetting the rest. You will stop day trading because you cannot beat the market and will lose your money. The sooner you learn this the better off you will be. The very worst thing that happens to day traders is that they start and do well. That confirms their belief in their superiority, and they double down. That happened to me, not so much day trading but speculating nevertheless. I did great, doubling my money in a few short months. That was the hook, I got my family to get in too, because they trusted me and I was doing so well. It did not end well. So the best that can happen is that you start day trading and you lose and quit. The worse is that you start day trading and you do well and double down. Eventually you will quit too, just losing the more money and the time you could have used investing. I look at the young people (they are all young to me) and laugh at what they are doing, until I remember how I was in my own youth.