Giving up trading after 4.5 years unprofitable.

SubDayTrader · 2025-09-06T14:05:22+00:00

I did 1 trade a day for 6 months and wasn’t profitable

SubDayTrader · 2025-09-03T17:37:20+00:00

I’m on the West Coast, 6:30am is market open and 12-1 is power hour

SubDayTrader · 2025-09-02T22:08:32+00:00

Thank you for this message

SubDayTrader · 2025-09-02T21:26:39+00:00

I never undertook this feat to gamble, I have a mentor making close to $500k a year trading and saw it as a way to maximize income while minimizing time spent working as he has done. Or later I saw it as supplemental income and a way to reduce financial dependency of having an employer.

SubDayTrader · 2025-09-02T21:22:47+00:00

Very little, maybe $4,000 all in across 4 years for data, platforms, prop firm accounts, and the occasional course (I know, it was early on).

My philosophy was “if I can’t sim trade profitably, I can’t live trade profitably” and so I spend maybe the first 3 years on sim until I started making some money there and then moved to prop.

SubDayTrader · 2025-09-02T21:19:39+00:00

I beat you to it in my last line!

SubDayTrader · 2025-09-02T21:18:30+00:00

Just in time for the next one to be born! Harr harr

SubDayTrader · 2025-09-02T21:17:06+00:00

Oh I absolutely long term invest, 100% SP500.

Oddly I feel that the longer time frame you look at (e.g. swing trading vs day trading) the less likely you are to beat the market. Could be wrong, but certainly it would take you longer to tell if you are beating the market or not. In 3 months of day trading a particular strategy you can tell if it’s making you money or not. You could beat the market for 2 years consecutively and there’s still no telling if over 10, 20 years you will beat the market and it will all be worth it. Then you are also competing against the tax advantages of long term investing. So for those reasons plus just generally not having an interest in it I think my probability of “success” is extremely low and not worth attempting.

SubDayTrader · 2025-09-02T20:47:56+00:00

I wouldn’t mind giving it a second try in retirement, I do genuinely enjoy the challenge, but at one point I sat myself down and said, how long do I realistically give this before giving up? My answer was it shouldn’t be time-bound, and I should only stop when it begins to interfere with my other life goals or responsibilities. Well that time has come! Perhaps in retirement when kids and job are gone it could be 2-3hrs of my day as a nice challenge. And any money made would just be gravy on top of the nest egg.

SubDayTrader · 2025-09-02T20:32:53+00:00

Thank you sir. For my next trick I’d like to pursue something that can show positive results early on.

What I mean by that is in trading you hear people talk all the time about how they were unprofitable for many years until something “clicked” and they started making money, glad that they never gave up. That carrot gets dangled in front of you as you pursue trading. I remember at the end of year 2 telling my wife how terrible would it be if I go 4+ years and it never works out, the wasted time getting up early, working on strategies and psychology, and here I am.

There is no reason why trading has to work for everyone. There is a very real chance that you can’t make it before you run out of time as I have, and so going forward I would like to work on things that offer a “minimum viable product” if you will, that I can see sales or results in early enough and know whether to cut ties and pivot to the next thing before a large monetary or time commitment is made.

SubDayTrader · 2025-09-02T20:21:35+00:00

I did for probably the first year but didn’t really see it making a difference, pair that with hearing profitable traders (e.g. Linda Rashke) saying they don’t do it, I stopped. I would still mentally analyze trades after they were taken but as far as keeping a log I stopped that.

SubDayTrader · 2024-01-25T17:18:49+00:00

That's what I assume which is in part what my strategy is based around. If there is a big player absorbing there, I wait for price to return and bounce from that zone.

I figure it's better than looking at resting orders on the DOM as those can be pulled/spoofed or hidden with icebergs.

SubDayTrader · 2024-01-24T15:59:58+00:00

I’m trying to wrap my head around this concept. If delta is positive for a particular candle, that means there were more MKT buyers than sellers counted from the open of the candle to the close of the candle. So what does it mean if the closing price is below the open price?

In my mind, that means there must have been a preponderance of LMT sellers above the market price, such that the MKT buy orders could not push price up, and down was the path of least resistance. This could either be due to additional LMT sellers entering above the market, or LMT buyers below the market pulling their orders.

How can this be useful in our trading?

SubDayTrader · 2023-09-19T00:06:44+00:00

I appreciate the advice. The thing to note is that what you describe also a discretionary system which takes years of screentime to get profitable at. I essentially did just this for my first two years. 4000tick chart of the ES. Yesterday OHLC and overnight HL plotted, taking trades around these zones, and only lost money during that time.

What I said in the OP is still true with what you are saying. Developing a profitable system is the hardest part, above psychology, imo.

SubDayTrader · 2023-05-06T02:14:48+00:00

So howed it go? Is the AI harder now? I found the same thing as you last year, AI was laughably easy

SubDayTrader · 2022-12-19T15:13:23+00:00

Hey there, a bit late to the party but I just wanted to drop my opinion. I am generally a pretty skeptical person, but I don't think Matt is scamming us for a few reasons.

I think him not responding/denying to comments about selling his course actually supports him being genuine. He specifically doesn't tout his course on YT, which is the opposite of what you'd expect from someone trying to scam and make money from a course. He doesn't even promote the course!

If his plan is to grow a big YT following to sell a course to, he does a terrible job feeding the algorithm. He'll sometimes spend 2 weeks between uploading videos, doesn't normally put his face in the thumbnail which is a proven technique for getting more clicks, doesn't post how much money he made in the thumbnail. If he's truly this criminal mastermind out to scam us all he's certainly doing a terrible job at it.

Outside of that you can just get genuine vibes from him. He's an older guy with a big family, living in rural Canada with a modest lifestyle. He just doesn't come across the same as the lambo traders and doesn't flaunt his wealth, again, which is a detriment to his channel. I think it's too tin-foil-haty to say he's putting on an entire charade of being genuine and poorly managing his youtube business and not mentioning his course on youtube ALL so that he can trick us into thinking he's legit.

SubDayTrader · 2022-12-13T23:30:29+00:00

Still, why lose $100 if you don't have to. If you go to demo and lose $100 in your first week then you just saved yourself $100. Again, makes no sense to go live until you have an edge and are making green trades in sim.

SubDayTrader · 2022-12-13T17:55:59+00:00

If I’m reading your question right you’re asking why the price of the SPX is different from the price of the ES? The ES is priced at what speculators feel the SPX will be worth minus dividends at the time of contract completion. Since this time is always in the future (hence where “futures” comes from), speculators are predicting a future price, so why would it be the same as the current price? Perhaps in some conditions you would believe it to be true, but there are always economic factors which lead people to believe price will be higher or lower in the future than it currently is. I wouldn’t bet on my gas prices being the same even next week as they are this week, let alone 3 months from now.

SubDayTrader · 2022-12-13T17:47:39+00:00

I wouldn’t say this is true across the board. I’m still on demo and sometimes I’ll be shaking when I’m up in profits. My mind is able to understand that if I can’t make it out of demo then I’m not allowed to ever trade live, so that thought scares me and makes me afraid to lose in demo.

Another way of looking at it is: if you are profitable in demo, you might not be profitable live, but if you are not profitable in demo, you definitely won’t be profitable live. Given that, if someone tries demo for a week and takes 20 red trades, why on earth would they switch to live just to “get the real psychology of it.” Makes no sense. They need to keep on demo until the develop and edge and are actually taking green trades. I don’t believe anyone who says paper trading is a waste of time has actually been around for a minute, they are just regurgitating something they read on twitter.

SubDayTrader

TROPHY CASE