Is Day trading Worth trying ?

This article is from NerdWallet.

A few lucky people do win the lottery, but odds are it won’t be you. That’s also how it is with day trading.

Day trading is the practice of buying and selling a stock over a short time frame, typically just a day. The goal is to earn a tiny profit on each trade and then compound those gains over a handful of days. It almost sounds like something from a George Clooney heist film. The problem for day traders, though, is that they’re usually the ones on the losing end.

Day trading may be the fastest and most glamorous way for retail — or nonprofessional — investors to wreck their portfolio and retirement.

The advent of day trading

With the rise of the online stockbroker and cheap trades, day trading became a viable, if inadvisable, way for retail investors to trade stocks. Traders look to add up daily gains, turning a few days’ worth of quick wins into a substantial bankroll.

That’s the theory, anyway.

In practice, retail investors have a hard time making money through day trading. Sure, they guess right from time to time, but the vast majority lose money. A 2010 study by Brad Barber at the University of California, Davis, suggests that just 1% of day traders consistently earn money. The study examined trades over a 14-year period, from 1992 to 2006.

The very small number who do make money consistently devote their days to the practice, and it becomes a full-time job, not merely hasty trading done between business meetings or at lunch.

Gambling in disguise

Day trading is the epitome of short-term investing, and that kind of investing is a zero-sum game. In other words, your loss is another investor’s gain and vice versa. So for most investors, day trading is really gambling in disguise, trying to beat other investors as they’re trying to beat you, with the house — the brokerage — taking a piece of the action in the form of commissions.

If you do become a successful day trader, you’ll have to pay taxes on these net short-term gains at your marginal tax rate, currently as high as 39.6%. The IRS defines net short-term gains as those from any investment you hold for one year or less. Even if you don’t hit that top bracket, the government will still take a sizable chunk of your earnings, with lower rates ranging from 10% to 35%. You do, however, get to offset the gains with trading losses.

Why day traders so rarely succeed

Day trading is so difficult for a variety of reasons, but they boil down to two major categories.

First, retail day traders are fighting against professionals who devote their careers to it. Pros know the tricks and traps. They have expensive trading technology, data subscriptions and personal connections. They’re perfectly outfitted to succeed, and even then they often fail.

Among these pros are high-frequency traders, who are looking to skim pennies or fractions of pennies — the day trader’s profit — off every trade. It’s a crowded field, and the pros love to have inexperienced investors join the fray. That helps them profit.

Second, retail investors are particularly prone to psychological biases that make day trading difficult. They tend to sell winners too early and hold losers too long, what some call “picking the flowers and watering the weeds.”

That’s easy to do when you get a shot of adrenaline for closing out a profitable trade. Investors engage in myopic loss aversion, which renders them too afraid to buy when a stock declines because they fear it might fall further.

The safest way to approach day trading

If you’re dead set on day trading, open a practice account and give it a go first before committing any real money. Many brokerage accounts offer practice modes, in which you can make hypothetical trades and observe the results. Above all, be honest about how you would trade in real life, since you want an accurate gauge of performance.

If you try this and still feel ready to try the real thing, see the best platforms for day trading.

If the practice exercise turns you off day trading, you can do what many intelligent investors do: engage in long-term, buy-and-hold investing in a well-diversified stock or fund portfolio. Add cash to the account regularly and let the power of growing businesses lead your portfolio to long-term gains.

Here are steps to further advance your investing expertise:

To find a great all-purpose stockbrokerage, see the NerdWallet analysis of the best online brokers for stock trading.

To understand how your time horizon should influence your investment strategy, learn about the differences in investing for short-term and long-term goals.

For some broad lessons on how to approach investing, see the NerdWallet tutorialon how to invest money.