Ha ha ha...
Don't know how others would perceive, anyways, would like to make some points about "Day Trading" in particular.
Day Trading, like all trading, used to take place on the trading room floors. There was a lot of yelling and phone's were ringing and there was a lot of money to be made when a price began to rise or fall. Information traveled very slowly. When the stock markets went digital, most of those early traders lost their jobs because they didn't have the technical background to adapt.
Why does this matter? Because the game has changed, and the majority of people who see small gains by day trading, do so by sheer luck and it always runs out. This is why so many people focus instead on day trading classes. Allow me to explain.
One thinks that perhaps he or she can learn to read charts and make a few good trades a week. But those charts are digital. With practice, one can teach own-self to react to them in 15 seconds, or maybe even 10 seconds, then just know that there's thousands of computers that are programmed to read them and they react in 1/10000th of a second, faster even. That's who we're trading against.
Investment companies with huge quantities of capital hire the smartest minds they can find to create supercomputers to react to the same charts. Not only are the computers quicker but they don't make mistakes. These computers are programmed to study and record the trends of a single stock, and they read it like a first language.
Not only that, but because they have so much capital, they control the market value of whatever stock their evaluating. Think of this computers purchases and sells like a giant wave. For instance, If that computer decides to sell all 20,000 shares of a random pharmaceutical stock at once, it creates a sell-off that sends the needle crashing down. Then when it decides to buy 20,000 shares again, the needle on that small pharmaceutical stock rockets because the previous fall in price begins to plateau and the amateur day traders jump back in predicting a new rise. So you decide to buy in because you think you've read the charts correctly, but the stock is only plateauing from a dip because of a massive purchase like the one I just described, and everyone reading the charts sees it and thinks it's time to buy. But in reality the computer is waiting for the suckers to buy in, creating a greater demand, and then when it sells all of it's shares after all the suckers invested with it and the price is high and ripe for a sell off, the worth of your shares plummets. If you happen to invest once or twice like the super-computer you're up against, you might win a few dollars. But the fools think they won because they're finally getting the hang of it, when really it was pure chance. They jumped in in the same direction of the wave, meaning they happened to buy when the computer was buying, and then sold when the computer was selling. But the wave is completely unpredictable, and the moment they take one step in the opposite direction of this wave, they're going to lose huge amounts in a matter of seconds.
Everything seems like a fantasy to me now. Mostly, people are making money through classes, advertisements, books, and partnerships, not from trading. It's preposterous, and scams none the less. There is nothing right or wrong anymore, sell products that can keep masses engaged (or deluded).
Unlike the "static" past, the present reality is always "dynamic", so, the future remains "unpredictable".
