[qnleigh]

I'm not downvoting you, but I think you are probably getting downvoted because "Stock trading can be quite lucrative" is statistically just not true. Even professional financial advisors almost never beat the market [0]. Only hedge funds that pay for huge amounts of priveledged financial information do, and even then not always.

Here's a good video that makes a case for this. Even if you don't agree, you might find some of the points he makes interesting. But tl;dr, he argues that index funds basically always outperform other methods, so one should primarily invest in things like that.

[0] https://youtu.be/T71ibcZAX3I?si=5kEkLoUhHDkajlyy

[LouisSayers]

Statistically speaking, we typically end up with a bell curve right?

So who's on the ends of the bell curve?

[qnleigh]

No offense intended, just speaking by the numbers you shared above, but it sounds like you are at the lower end of the bell curve. Most day traders are, largely because they don't have access to priveledged information like the datasets that hedge funds buy. If they make better bets than you do, then they literally take your money. Those aren't good odds.

[LouisSayers]

I'm at the lower end in the same way that a junior dev is at the lower end of the salary band. This is to be expected for anyone just starting out.

You're assuming that you need privileged information that is not available, but what I'm trading is basically the big player moves - indicated by movement volume in a stock.

You don't need all the info, there are emergent patterns that result for stocks that make big moves over time.

Not every stock that matches one of these patterns will be a winner, but you can base a strategy around this that allows you to have enough success, especially when you combine this with other attributes of the stock (and market conditions) at the particular point in time.

I'm openly aware that so far I'm in the negative. However most of this is due to me not having sold when instructed to (holding onto "favourite" stocks). Very close to break even currently, so no harm done after 6 months playing in the market.