[ryandrake]

Good luck to you! I remember back in the late 90's / early 2000's when The Stock Market Only Goes Up, and 1/4 of my software peers quit to "become day traders." Well when the bear market inevitably came, I started seeing them back in scrum meetings... Do your due diligence and and preserve your capital :)

[shoo]

It can be very difficult to look at the realised outcome and disentangle how much of that outcome was driven by decision making, and how much was due to variability of factors entirely outside of your control, i.e. "luck". What if your decision making is poor and over-fitted to current conditions that are not guaranteed to persist, but you keep (temporarily) winning anyway?

Taleb writes about this kind of thing in Fooled by Randomness. Poker player Annie Duke's book "thinking in bets" also goes into it.

I reckon to some extent public market conditions in recent years since GFC have approximately been "stock market only goes up" with a few small fluctuations from covid, negative oil price weirdness, etc. Lots of investors trying desperately to invest cash in recent years pouring money into variety of highly speculative areas -- SPACs, crypto, fraudulent EV companies (Nikola rolling their "truck" down the hill to make it look like it was self propelled, lol).

At some point the music will stop.

[hutrdvnj]

A good day trader is able to shift gears in case of a bear market e.g. knows when to short. Very few days traders are actually good, most lose money and quit after some months.

[JKCalhoun]

I remember. So easy to day trade when everything was going up, ha ha.

[neilv]

I remember this too. I decided I'd only try it with $1K. Soon, I'd tripled my money (despite trading fees), decided that I'd proven I could do it, and then put it all for long-term into a company I liked and believed in (Red Hat).

Later, I learned that winning being easy was the nature of the market at the time, rather than it being a personal achievement worth proving.

I also was lucky that I didn't discover a compulsive/addictive weakness for the activity, which could've turned a $1K experiment into personal ruin.