Day trading for pain and suffering

I ran a 6 month experiment in day trading between June and December 2020. I wanted the title of this article to be “Day trading for fun and profit” but that couldn’t be further from reality and would be straight up lying. 🥲

Saying it was “brutal” would be an understatement. The rollercoaster of emotions can be illustrated by my trading account balance chart below during that period.

I almost blew up my account not only once, not twice, but three times, as you can see above in October, November and December.

On November 11th, 2020 I had ~$40k on my account. On November 18th, a mere week later, I had just $13k, an astonishing 68% loss in 7 days. I was mentally and physically exhausted and, at that point, I knew I could no longer keep doing it.

Living on the west coast, I convinced myself to wake up at 6am every weekday morning, something that I’ve probably never done consistently in my entire life. I wanted to prepare before the market opened at 6:30am PT (9:30am ET) to start trading. Since most of the price action happened in the first hour after market open, it was important for me to be up and ready in front of the computer at that time, so I could capture any opportunities as soon as they presented themselves.

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