Topic: Common misconceptions about day trading (Read 539 times)

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Once you have the skills, you should be fine in any form of treading you are doing. However, day trading exposes one to a whole lot of risk and I am sure not everyone would absolutely want to be busy taking such risk. The reason why I said a lot of risk is that, in the normal short term, sometimes the chart just does not respond to the indicators let alone for very short term frames, which makes it look more like you are just counting on both the indicators and luck to make a good gain.

As I have already written somewhere over here, Bitcoin and other major alts too were quite forgiving till recently. You could literally sit on your coins doing nothing and being completely indifferent to price moves, corrections, pullbacks, or whatever, and still book hefty profits at the end of the day simply because the whole market had been consistently rising. But now these days may be over, so your only chance to make up for the losses due to buying at the top can be via buying at local dips and selling at local peaks.

The only reason why I stopped day-trading and concentrate on short term was just because of the stress of having to strain my eye on the chart all day, but for those who understand how to do their thing and make use of the quick swings in the market to their advantage, they are not gambling, and they are getting the best from it. Obviously, most people do not, and day trading, short trading or whatever, they are still gambling anyway since they have no strategy.

The harsh truth is that there is a "house" in trading too, which has a sort of house edge over the majority of traders. If we think of crypto as a zero-sum game, which is a pretty close approximation anyway, then those who can't lose make the rest of the pack lose. There is simply no third option, and the effect on your chances of success in trading is essentially the same as the one produced by the house edge in gambling.

With my trading day there is always the risk and your emotional ability associated with emotions leads to many risks and pitfalls.

But the problem is while that would be the logical thing to do many do not think like that, after losing money in the market they cannot let it go, they wan to recover the money they lost, but since their abilities are limited then they never do and they enter in a vicious cycle from which they never recover without understanding that if they just held not only they would not have lost that money but in fact got greater profits.

I think of gambling is based on random chance and the house always has an edge.  I think it poorly describes trading crypto in any timeframe since pricing is not random and there isn't a house that always wins in the longer term.  The high volatility means it's risky and people associate high risk with gambling, but that does not make them the same thing. 

But without excitement it can not work. except for interest and expectation, a person must thirst for results and only in this case the results will be positive.

Before using an indicator, you are advised to back test it on historical trading data. I know that past growth doesn't in the least guarantee future performance, but there is even less chance that some indicator would ever work in the future if it didn't in the past. I certainly give the benefit of doubt to TA enthusiasts here but when I tested a few TA strategies on historical data myself, none was close enough to being truly successful apart from pure coincidence like the broken clock being right twice a day.

I dont always use leverage and when i do its usually only 2x. 3x at the max. I actually havent had access to leveraged bitcoin trading recently -
 only altcoins. Its a combination of leverage, altcoins, and selling forks at the right time, and getting in on crazy unusual movements. For instance I sold my bch at the peak of 0.5btc then rebought that crash to 0.2btc and sold at 0.38btc all within minutes. I probably overrepresent my "bitcoin" success because half of my net worth is from the last dogecoin rally.

I often trade on the stock exchange. I always work to earn. Maybe it's luck, but I don't think it is. I never expect peak points in the chart. It helps me close deals. There are no such opportunities in gambling. You're totally dependent on luck. My opinion is that the market is more likely to get income. Excitement always prevents to make the right decision.

Some people, if not to say most people, rely on luck alone in their trading patterns, so it is not very different from gambling for them. They just place an order or two here and there, and blindly hope, often in vain, that the price will rise. On the other hand, if you simply follow the trend, you are not gambling already. Because statistically, the trend, once it establishes itself, has more chances to continue than to reverse. This doesn't mean that it will continue indefinitely, of course. This is about chances. Further, if you use arbitrage, your chances of earning are pretty close to 100%. The point is there is no point in such sweeping and hasty generalizations.


Dictionaries do not provide definitions (textbooks do), they give explanations.

Day trading for sure is the harder one of the two and that is why I believe many people stick to long term hodl. Yes they prefer hodling but it isn't necessarily because that is their favorite thing to do, it is because in the absence of being able to day trade, this is the only type of trading most can afford to undertake.

True, but the same can be said with regard to long-term holding as well. Ironically, people who first thoughtlessly engage in day trading quickly turn into holders and investors, sort of, when the price goes strongly against them and they don't quickly close their position. They are hunting for small profits completely oblivious to the risk they expose themselves to. They may earn here and there, and then short but powerful price move eats all their "hard-earned" profits leaving them eternally in red. This is why most people should likely stay away from day trading altogether.

The thing is that day trading isn't really for everyone. I agree that when people say day trading is gambling, they just haven't developed the skill needed to make successful trades. Its not just about luck. Its observation and good analyzation of coins.

I would say exposure to luck and exposure to a lot of risk. I have tried day trading before and even with stoch or RSI to play with the 80-20 rule with overbought and oversold in a specific time frame of choice, it just does not work sometimes, and most times you just have to be able to learn to play your cards right with a lot of stop loss in the process. I know a lot of people have been doing this and working out for them, but it is just a lot of stress to take in and I would rather stick to the short term or long.

Some people totally are just fund of gambling anyway and they see everything they do as gambling, so I would not expect them to say otherwise, since all they do is to only sell high and buy low without considering some other things in the process or making use of some oscillatory indicators to make their decisions. Day trading may be stressful and need a lot of concentration, but if done well, it is far more than just gambling.

As mention, those who understand and have a good assessment anticipating the movements, day trading is for those who have a big nerved and a big balls to risk with certain dips expecting that the coin will bounce back in your favor, for sure those who thinks that its like a gambling doesn't have a good
look inside of this strategy, people who keep losing their money and don't know what to do when situation did not go to their way.

Okay so what you are telling me is that you are not talking about day trading when you posted a thread saying that day trading is not gambling. Just FYI, the majority of people here are aware of the one valid and real definition of day trading, which means entering and exiting a position within one day. I think most people here honestly thought that you were talking about day trading and that you understood what the term means. I certainly did.

This definition is not a negotiable one, it is the indisputable dictionary definition. There is no room for discussion here about what the term day trading means to you or me... if you use it to refer to some other strategy (as it seems you are trying to do here) then you are wrong. Furthermore, it was not at all clear to anyone that you are talking about your own unclear and inaccurate definition of the term.

This is like if you called a cat a horse, and then said "Whatever, they both have four legs... everyone knew what I meant".

Holy fucking crap dude, congrats on your trading success, that is beyond impressive. Unless most other guys, I believe you.
I am assuming you use quite a bit of leverage?

Some people are really taking for granted what bitcoin trading is, sometimes they are just being practical for some reason that they wanna see outcome as soon as possible and they don't want to lose for even a single centavo. They thought that day trading is a good idea and will give you everyday profit but in fact will not since it is too risky.

You may stick to that definition of course but I find it rather restrictive, especially the part about entering and exiting a position within the same day. From my perspective, this is an unwarranted and unjustified requirement from purely technical point of view. If you see that the price rises, why would you want to exit a profitable position? Just to make sure it fits some clumsy definition? You may make a dozen trades one day and no trades the next day because you are just waiting for the right time to hit. Does it mean that it is not day trading? Or one day it is day trading, while the other not? Anyway, if you don't like me or anyone else, for that matter, using the term day trading, replace it with active trading in your mind. Basically, you are being overly pesky about insignificant details which are debatable even on their own. I don't think quarreling over definitions adds anything of substance to the discussion. Most of us understand what day trading essentially means.

I dont see how daytrading is gambling if I've identified a bitcoin chart pattern that is going to yield me a 30% profit 95% of time and yield me a 2% loss the other 5% of the time. It's more like picking bills off of a free money tree.

Any income generation is associated with excitement. I disagree that trading on the stock exchange is like gambling. When you play casino you depend on luck 100%. When you trade on the stock exchange depends on luck by only 50%. The remaining 50% is your knowledge and ability to analyze the situation.

No actually I clearly did read what you wrote. You continued to claim that the term "day trading" meant something that it does not mean, despite the fact that I had already mentioned the dictionary definition which contrasts with your inaccurate definition.

Day trading IS 100% luck based. Just because you profit over the long term does not mean that you are not gambling. As mentioned before, which you still seem to be having trouble grasping, it is about your performance compared to the market. Anybody could have chosen literally random points to buy and sell bitcoin over the course of 2017 and they almost certainly would have made a profit, but they also would have almost certainly underperformed the buy/hodl strategy.

I find it interesting that you claim you "really don't understand what I am trying to prove here" when I have made it extremely objectively clear. I'm trying to make people aware that day trading is gambling, which is an indisputable fact. You can continue spending hours and hours learning and researching bogus day trading strategies and underperforming whatever market you are trading in, or you can buy and hold, make way more money, and use that time to do something that is not useless.

Myself, I belong to the same flock. I never understood that idea about waiting a few years until price rises high enough. Okay, you set your target price to some value but what if price stops just short of it? You will hate yourself till the end of your days for not selling right then. I understand when people want big profits, I want big profits too, and big profits come with big price changes. I'm okay with that. What I'm not okay with is the idea of stubborn waiting and blindly hoping for the best. And here comes day trading, or active trading if someone is not happy with my understanding of it, and riding the wave whenever there is an opportunity.

You are correct in what you write, but the reasons those misconceptions exist at all has to do with the irresponsibility of many of those that day trade, day trading can be extremely profitable but there are those that engage in the activity despite their limited knowledge and as you may expect their results are very poor this leads them to conclude that day trading is like gambling even if that is not the case.

I don't really understand what you are trying to prove here. If you don't like my approach to day trading, I'm not forcing you to post in this thread. Also, you don't seem to be reading what I write either. Here we are talking about day trading not being gambling. In gambling, you are not supposed to earn other than by luck alone and over longer terms the impact of luck is entirely cleared away. That means losing whatever language you speak. So it is a pretty simple choice. If you earn over longer time spans, it is not gambling. Whether it is day trading or otherwise is irrelevant. I don't really know what else can be added to this, though I don't mind if you disagree or anything.

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I disagree with you here, I do not think that is what they mean. That is not what the word "profitable" means. I don't know why you think they do mean that.


No, this is demonstrably false. Look at the link I sent. Day trading has a definition, and it requires making two trades within one day. Day trading means entering and exiting a position within one day. If you are not doing this, you are not day trading. It's simple.

Others would say that if I just hold my coin then I would not miss good profit opportunities by selling earlier but I am just maximizing my profit by riding the waves. I am swing trading and taking small profits everyday because that's the way I like it. I am not the kind of person who would wait for the time when the coin would be hype because I just want to learn trading and besides that, I will learn more about it when I trade continuously and watching the charts more often than just waiting for the day when the coin is hype. Well, we have different strategy and I like day trading more.

I assume everyone saying Bitcoin daytrading is profitable means in comparison to just "hodling" or, as you say, beating the market. Why are you assuming that's not what they mean?

Daytrading doesn't really mean doing trades each and every day, unless you are arbitring or scalping (which can also be more profitable in comparison to market). It means watching the market all day long and taking advantage of any clear signals you might see (and maybe doing some routine "scalping" to profit on the volatility in the meantime).

I never said, or implied, that day trading meant buying and selling all you have. However, it DOES involve buying and selling within one day, BY DEFINITION. That is what day trading is. Intra-day trading to take advantage of fluctuations in price within one day. This is not a misconception or anything, this is literally the dictionary definition of day trading: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/day%20trader

You are not reading what I wrote. It does not matter if you profit, that is meaningless. The only thing that matters is how you perform compared to the market. If you profit but you underperform the market as a whole, your strategy is failing.

Day traders do not determine trends the same way as long term investors. Long term investors look at fundamentals and day traders do not because fundamentals do not affect intra-day price movements.

Day trading is gambling, period. It is 100% luck based. Anything that is luck based is gambling. Long term investing is NOT luck based, and therefore is not gambling. It's that simple.

TERA, I know your track record, and I agree that spotting buying opportunity in bitcoin is not that difficult. What I struggle is to identify when to sell - I guess I got hodler mentality now, plus for tax reasons selling can be risky - I mean, it does not make sense to loose long-term capital gains to rebuy 10% cheaper. Do you mind sharing your criteria for selling?

I hope many novice traders will look into this approach without having superstitious fear about day trading. As long as you manage to keep things under control (not overdoing it), it is quite doable as well as financially rewarding and emotionally fulfilling. By employing the tactic described here, you are making stats work for you. No one knows how the price will behave even in the near future but we can be dead certain that volatility, and short-term volatility specifically, is not going anywhere, so why not take advantage of it?

I feel your sentiments brother because day trading isn't like you're buying and wait it all day to pump because we might tend to miss the pump to sell and we're just like staring at the blank space and repeat it the other day. So better buy when everyone is shaking and sell when everyone is greedy.

Believe me, most of us get it. But not everyone has what it takes to be a day trader. I tried it when I first started trading Bitcoin. Of course, I lost some money. Hahaha.

So I changed my strategy to "buying the dips", and everything has been ok for me ever since.

The strategy that short-term trading should account for only a (relatively) small portion of your portfolio seems to be good one to me, and it is something which I have followed too. If you truly believe in Bitcoin, then the long-term coins that you hold will give you the returns. The smaller portion, which you use for day trading, can provide a further boost to your portfolio value.

As I have written in OP, there is a lot of confusion about day trading. Day trading doesn't necessarily mean that you buy and sell all you have within just one day. Day trading refers to your trading activity, how many trades you make daily. In this way, there is no precise definition of it. It is a loosely defined concept where many different trading strategies fit. You determine the trend in the same way as you do for long-term holding, and then you capitalize on short-term volatility. As long as you can make profits consistently as in arbitrage, which is also day trading, it is not gambling. This is the difference I want to point out.

It's really depends what you base your decisions on,because if you base your decisions only analyzing the graph, then you will probably lose at day trading because there are  always bots who can do it better, so at the long run it will be hard to make a profit.
But bots can't trade based on news and predictions, so if you can predict a product to be successful or you know that an agreement is going to be signed between a cryptocurrency and a big company, then you can buy a coin for the long run, and the bots won't have an advantage over you.
I believe that earning in day trading if you trade by hands is harder then buying coins for the long run.

ITs not gambling. Buying a 50-70% crash with a volume candle that eclipses everything else on the chart is a 95% win. The other 5% is the exchange youre trading on getting hacked. If you think it's gambling it's because you're new to bitcoin and not familiar with how bouncy and resilient it is.

what you explained here is no doubt gambling!

You don't just buy when there is a high volume dip or crash, you basically gambling and hoping that the market recovers to what it was or even better and this kind of crypto buying ( day trading) is not always a smooth ride as market could further crash as was the case when bitcoin rose to as high as $19k and has not recovered since...

I'm not obligated to provide anyone proof here. I'm simply describing how I came to the opinion that daytrading can work. It's very easy in Bitcoin. There are super predictable patterns that happen over and over. Buying a 50%-70% drop in a short time is always a win. A high volume is always bullish. You also get to trade on smaller exchanges that aren't the leader and you can play follow the leader and have a 5 second advantage. The same shapes on the chart play out over and over. I've seen them hundreds of times. There is tons of volume. It's truly a different market than anything else and we have an advantage because the professionals have not penetrated it yet. It's like a hack. I'm probably not going to trade anything else after I trade crypto because it would suck.

"Guys, day trading works, trust me! I'm a multi millionaire and I consistently outperform the market by day trading! I can't prove it but you should all be impressed!"

Okay buddy.

I first bought in when bitcoin was around $200. For every dollar I initially invested, I now have $5,000. If I merely bought bitcoin, that dollar would now be worth $50. You will have to take my word for it. It would be impossible to prove this and any attempt to do so would be rather dangerous.

In a way, it is. But it is "calculated gambling", but still gambling because you do not really know if your trade will result in a profit or a loss.


They all are because we take the risks. Starting a business can also be argued as a "gamble". But there's "good gambling" and "bad gambling".

Good gambling is the type that you had put a lot of thought into. Bad gambling is betting in a casino roulette game.


It is but it's not for everyone. Some of us like to buy the dip and hold.


Whatever works for you. But I would like to see some data on how much holders made compared to how much day traders made from 2015 to 2017.

It is true that day trading can lead to people focusing too much on the short term. But it is also true that day trading, if done right, can mean that you are capitalizing on both short term swings and long term gains of bitcoin or other speculative investments.

My personal experience with day trading is that I find myself tired out by the constant movements, which leads me to panic sell when the opportunity isn't even close to ripe yet. I'm sure i'm a prime example of an inexperienced trader in that regard.

It's no good to promote day trading to everyone, it's certainly not for everyone. But to say that it's no skill and all gambling is a bit too much. It has a lot more luck involved than long term speculation, since pumps can happen sooner or later and you don't know.

I see your point, but it doesn't make much logical sense. You don't take away this element of luck (expressed by what I meant as external factors) by shortening the time frame, you don't regain any more control from uncontrollable factors. I do agree that day trading realises gains (and losses!) more quickly because their exit points (and even entry) are determined by simple timeframes as opposed to price points.

Either way, it's pretty pointless to argue if trading is gambling - I think traders who don't apply discipline or rationale to their trades are gamblers. Simple as that. Just like the master poker player isn't really gambling since he actively minimises his exposure to luck, skilled traders do the same.

And you still can't call the top in day trading... it's still pretty much random. I joined a thread a couple of months back with about 20 players competing against AI on predicting daily ending prices. It just gave me more evidence of this.

Another thing is that common misconceptions about day trading became "common" to many people because they "commonly" lose a huge amount of money from it. They trade on a daily basis, exposing themselves to risks (in a daily basis) and thus giving more chance to make a bad trade and lose money in the long run.

Personally, I'm not into day trading as I find it very taxing on my physical body as well as mental health. Maybe, my mind is also polluted by these misconceptions but I really believe that it is not for me. I have my own strategy to trade (not day trading) and so far, this provide good profit for myself without so much effort.

First of all you talk about capitalizing on short term volatility like it is easy to do, and like people are capable of doing it consistently. When you buy an asset with the intent of trading it intra-day, how do you know it is going to go up and not down? You can lose money as easily as you gain it. There is no way to accurately predict price movements on this small of a scale CONSISTENTLY. Day traders will lose just as often as they win over a long enough period of time, and because of fees, this will end up putting them on the losing side overall.

Also, profit earned is NOT all that counts. If I am day trading in the stock market and earning 8% ROI in a year, but the S&P500 returns 12%, all of my work figuring out what to sell and buy and when, was just a waste because I could make more profit by just holding an index fund. Same with bitcoin - if you day traded bitcoin in 2017 and made a 200% return, you have failed because you would have made more money by just holding bitcoin. All of that day trading not only failed to help you make money, but it resulted in a massive amount of wasted time and wasted potential profit.

And regarding your comment about not always being right about future growth... it's true that you won't always be right, but you can be right the majority of the time. You can certainly be right MUCH more often than day traders. If you put in the time/effort/research for long term investing, you can get to a point where the only time you are wrong about the long term prospects of a company is pretty much when some unpredictable catastrophe happens, or some information is being deliberately kept hidden.


Day trading by definition does not involve looking at the long term value of an asset, because the long term value has zero impact on the price within a given day. Take Snapchat for example, which had some great days after its IPO, spiking from $17 to $27 per share, even though long term it is a garbage company.

I have just about given up on day trading for a couple of reasons:

1) it’s too hard for me to get a good trading range in a day
2) if I watch the charts all day, I get too emotional/stressed
3) I really don’t have the time to devote to day trading
4) the new tax laws in the US make it difficult to day trade because you have to track every trade and the US dollar equivalent of the coins you are trading

Rofl show some proof. This is 100% a lie. You are claiming that for every dollar you invested in 2013, you now have $10,000. I don't think you understand the claim you just made. It's like saying you can run 100 meters in half the time of Usain Bolt. It's laughable.

If you think about it, you will see that day trading is there to take away the element of luck and at the same time capitalize on it. It may sound strange but there is a lot of sense in this. Even if you can correctly estimate the growth potential, you won't be able to say where the actual top will be because it will be completely unpredictable bordering on random. In turn, it means that you have to sell now and then. Day trading just takes this way of action to its logical conclusion. From this perspective, long-term holding itself with a specific price in mind as a target is the gambling.

Buy and hold is as much of a gamble as daytrading, I personally don't agree with daytrading being gambling. In both methods you conduct your research, whether that be trough math or trough investigating the technology and news. As nothing is guarranteed and you can't guarrantee that if I buy and hold the price will go up its a bet you're taking, statistical decisions on how likely you find it that something will go up. Anything can go wrong and right.

You can never tell if something is going to work out, so in that sense you're always gambling.

My personal take is that day trading just like all forms of trading has a large amount of skill involved but also a big luck element. Just based on my own personal definitions of gambling I would say it's still gambling.

The distinction is that the experienced traders can make good decisions so that there gambles are sensible and in the long term would return a profit.

Just to start off, I believe that all trading... Even the mpst basic concept of trade and commerce, are exposed to some element of luck. Bitcoin's extreme volatility has made day trading an incredibly viable method of profit taking but also increases this exposure to luck.

That said, I think the most successful traders with the most consistent performances understand this element of luck and use their experience and skill to minimise reliance on luck, otherwise known as external factors beyond their control.

Technical analysis hasn't convinced me as a reliable trading tool for Bitcoin, it certainly has much less reliability in day trading, but the moderate success of bot and algorithm models used by day tradera suggests that there is enough data and short patterns in the volatility, though likely specific to platform and location.

Arbitrage is one example that thrives in day trading. If not only exclusive to it.

Profit earned is all that counts in the end. Note that I'm not saying that day trading is profitable for everyone or it is a losing game for every trader out there. But it simply can't be gambling if you accept that trading as such is not gambling. There is no other choice because all price growth starts small, even profits from long-term investment are made of small price moves. Capitalizing on the volatility which results from these small moves allows you to earn higher profits because there is no growth without corrections, however small those can be. Add to this that you can't always be right in your assessment of the future growth and even more so in respect to the extent of it.

And you completely write off arbitrage which belongs to day trading as much as day trading is concerned.


You would need to use trading bots for that and take into account trading fees obviously. Ultimately, it all comes down to how efficiently you allocate your trading capital so as not to lose profit on bigger price moves. It looks like you think that day trading excludes any possibility of "seeing a long-term value in an asset". This is another misconception, of course.

I have outperformed bitcoin by 10,000% by daytrading and these increases have been steady since 2013. Daytrading is not gambling. It is a simple system where you learn to buy high volume dips and crashes, and breakouts. I guess 'Daytrading is gambling' is like this nice catchy excuse for bad traders for them to blow off steam.

You are incredibly wrong here and very misguided. Day trading absolutely is gambling. It is gambling because it is luck based and not based on any type of valid research or methodology. Strategies for trading assets intra-day by looking at charts do not lead to consistently outperforming the market over the long term, and there are tons of studies and data out there that show this. Almost no day traders consistently beat the market in which they are trading as a whole.

Other trading strategies are often not gambling. Long term investing is the furthest thing from gambling that you can do. Buying an asset because you see value in it and believe it will appreciate over time is the most consistent way to make money. Even trading over 1-4 month periods or so (which is most of what I do) is far from gambling because it is not luck-based but rather based on understanding the fundamentals of the asset and the market in which it is traded.


What statistic are you talking about that suggests the best trading strategy would be capitalizing on both short term volatility and long term growth? It sounds like you are just saying the best way to trade is sell at the top of every peak and buy at the bottom of every dip. This is not realistic.

You're overall understanding of day trading (which is 100% gambling) is very flawed. Sure there is short term volatility that comes with opportunity to make money, but nobody has the information to consistently profit off of that volatility. It is essentially random noise in a larger, less random pattern.

There seems to be a lot of confusion, misconception and misunderstanding about day trading and its advantages as well as disadvantages. Some people even say that it is a form of gambling. In this topic I want to explain why it is not and also address the most common issues which day traders encounter and how they handle them. Thank you for your attention.

First of all, day trading is no more gambling than any other trading. If the price rises you ride the wave, if it doesn't you wait until it does. That's pretty much all. In this sense, if day trading is gambling, then all trading is essentially gambling. Besides, arbitrage is also day trading which involves quite a few trades (actually, twice as many) albeit it is anything but gambling.

Further, there is a question of limited profitability. This question has some substance but it seems that people who raise it don't fully understand what day trading comes down to. Many erroneously think that it is mostly about missing good profit opportunities. In fact, nothing can be farther from truth than that. Day trading if done right is actually about maximizing your profits, not losing them.

Statistically, your best trading strategy would be capitalizing on both short-term volatility and long-term growth. Since most price moves happen in a rather narrow range followed by relatively rare but big price changes, an optimal strategy would be dividing your trading capital into parts, smaller parts for catching short-term volatility, while bigger parts for capitalizing on longer-term growth.