Is Day Trading Worth It in 2023?
Is day trading worth it? Let’s be honest. You’re here because you wish to day trade crypto – whatever path led you to finally reading this article, you’ve been tempted into exploring financial freedom through the world of cryptocurrency. After all, it moves faster than an F1 car on a good day.
Disclaimer: We want to emphasize that this is not financial advice. Cryptocurrencies operate in a volatile market, where values can drastically fluctuate in a blink of an eye. It is imperative to conduct thorough research and seek guidance from a qualified financial advisor before investing.
Day Trading: Easy Money?
The reality of this business is quite harsh. Let me fill you in on a study performed in the Brazillian equity futures market, where they researched the trading performance of individual traders. 97% of traders who persisted in their trading for at least three hundred days lost money, and only 0.4% earned more than 50 dollars per day. The best trader out of everyone there made an average of 310 US dollars every day. Day trading is quite unprofitable it seems if that research paper is anything to go by, but nobody really tells you that you’ll most likely be the one paying a whale’s lunch today because you’re making a really uneducated call in the market. This all sounds like I’m trying to turn you away from day trading, huh?
Quite the opposite. Let me share my own experience trading crypto since late 2016. The path to being at least marginally successful starts with hundreds of hours of education, and primarily with the knowledge that any claims of overnight profit and becoming a millionaire in a week are false and most likely part of someone’s marketing strategy to sell you their product or course. Believe me, it’s no easy task.
My friends laughed at the idea that cryptocurrency would ever be a substantial part of any financial system and made fun of me for trying to become independent through trading. And they would have been right about the latter if I had stopped after blowing my first account on bad trading practices. But if you’re stubborn enough, you’ll learn with every mistake you make.
Day Trading: Getting Started
I started with a good old paper and pen combination, testing scalping strategies using basic indicators before actually having the courage to start betting my own hard-earned Ethereum. It took a while before I started seeing consistent profits – months to be fair. So what kept me? I came from a background of playing video games competitively, and I translated the chart I saw on TradingView to the mechanics of a first-person shooter.
Every move has an explanation, everything has a relationship to each other, it can all be measured. Every move can be predicted, but only if you spend enough time playing the ‘game’, to fully understand its inner workings, and nobody was going to stop me from understanding what drives the price.
Day Trading: Then & Now
Romanticizing aside, times have changed. Fast forward five years, and all everyone talks about is trading Futures, as exchanges now offer leverage to draw you into their business, promising great profits really fast. It’s true, and we’ve gotten spoiled by this fact. And how times have changed. Bitcoin rose from a few hundred dollars for a piece, there are so many different crypto coins and tokens to choose from, it’s really confusing and difficult for someone new.
There’s a sea of opportunity now with this mass adoption being executed all over the world. Instead of betting my coin against USD, I trade against Tether with leverage up to 125X. The general sentiment within the crypto trading community is that you’re only as good if you are patient and willing to learn. There are mountains of educational content on different platforms such as YouTube. You’ll find the best theory in the form of PDFs if you know your way around good old search engines – and equipping yourself with knowledge is the best strategy for attacking the problem of day trading successfully.
Day Trading: Persistence is Key
When your time comes and you’re finally doing everything right, you’ll know why you started in the first place. Every hour of time spent learning about technical analysis will have been worth it, every dollar lost will be forgotten. The euphoria and adrenaline securing your first 500% gain is something otherworldly. To avoid becoming part of that horrid statistic, you’ll need to pride yourself in a few personal qualities:
- Patience
- Perseverance
- Confidence
- Ability to retain great amounts of information
- Most importantly, working well under stress
But when it rains, it pours.
For a quick second, let me mention motivation. You’ll want to quit – everyone does eventually. Maybe it’s a smoother realization that you’re just not profitable and you’ve tried your best, or a harsher one when you get liquidated doing something really stupid and against your own discipline. What separates you from being a loser (in a literal sense of the word) or a winner is your willingness to accept reality and adapt your trading style. Deposit more and try again and again until you catch your stride. When you do, you’ll thank the person who was there at your side keeping your head up. You’ll thank yourself. You might even remember my words in this article.
If after some solid consideration you’re still on the path to becoming a day trader, surround yourself with like-minded people. Find your circle of people who you can trust and be wary of everything that sounds too good to be true. After all, you can never be too careful on the internet.
So, is Day Trading Worth It?
Yes! If you'd like to learn more about trading from myself and the rest of the Filthy Rich Futures team, you can do so by joining our Discord group! Surround yourself with like-minded people, Filthy Rich Futures is a group of futures traders that is suitable for both beginners and (semi-) professionals, see you there!
Rich F.
Rich F. is the founder of Filthy Rich Futures, a Futures trading community with a focus on high-leverage trading with strict risk management. Rich F. has a background in IT Security and promotes risk-awareness. In his spare time, Rich F. likes to go hiking, explore various cuisines, and worships the sun.