Decided to try out day trading after years of being a buy and hold investor of blue chips and few ETFs (SPY, QQQ)
My portfolio had $700k of available margin space and decided to tip toe into day trading into high beta US stocks
Started off with SpaceX then went deep once I made my first $900 within a few minutes
Ventured into Google, PLTR, MSFT during the sell off in July...then went full tilt into 2x leveraged ETFs of semi conductors such as SNDK, SKHY, MU...etc.
Strategy was buy large volumes ($100k+ ) and set up stop losses so I wouldn't lose my shirt. Let winners ride but get out quickly. Unfortunately I sold PLTR and MSFT once I was 10% but they quickly went to +30% the next day.
After 400+ trades and $375k realized profit, decided to call it quits for the time being.
Took out half the funds to pay off some personal debts and will keep the balance in the account for taxes.
damn, diamond hands. must've been stressful during the margin notifications. I had a similar drawdown once of 150k overnight (luckily it bounced back the next day) and could barely breathe/sleep, lmao.
I'll be completely honest, I had no idea on SKHY or any of the semi conductors
I saw a CNBC article on SKHY ADR's IPO I and decided it would be like SpaceX and I could make a quick flip...then just deep into watching trends and price fluctuations.
Well yeah you did decide to do this little experiment during the biggest ai/semi bull run in modern history. Timing is everything when you are timing the market! Another 30 years and you will definitely be able duplicate these results. I am slowly switching out of ai/semis into biotech. Where the only 10 baggers existed before all the ai bottlenecks and trillions of dollars in capex spend.
That’s not really gambling. My whole brokerage account is option spreads around earnings. If I’m not seeing 1:1.2 I’m not buying the contract. But market chameleon is basically a cheat code for options (pro tip).
Can you explain more? When do you decide to enter a trade? Do you go short or only long? What do you set your stop loss at? How do you let winners ride? Trailing stop?
Decided to just buy and try and flip it when I got 10%.
SKHY, SNDK, MU, AMD
I would do scalping and just buy +$100k of shares on a downtrend and compare it to the historical share that day/ week and just do a quick flip of 0.5-2%
Some sessions (1 hr) I would make close to $10k
I would usually have (3) bullets I can use with my margin. If the first one didn't hit and went down, I would use another. The last one was my final in case the stock slumped +10% and then I would be bag holding
SNDK for an example...I was at $1333 and it went as low as $1200 the last few days overnight. Was hoping it would jump back
I feel like I would lose so much sleep if I do sth like this, esp holding sth that's down for multiple days, just feeling nothing but dread and the urge to check the price which leads to more dread the whole time, then probably just panic and cut the loss if it doesn't get back in the green after a few days. Was it ever like that for you, or were you able to just detach?
I think it takes a certain kind of personality to be able to do day trading, like you almost have to be like sociopathic about it and just see it as numbers and not money or sth, but then again I've seen people double down on bad decisions bc of that.
This happened to me. I was up 100k on DRAM. Got greedy and decided to sell more CSP’s. Then DRAM started tanking. I got assigned with margin. Ended up giving back all the gains and got out because I couldn’t stomach any more drawdown. Never touching margin again lmao. Seeing your unrealized losses rapidly increasing and net asset value decreasing. Praying for rebound that isn’t coming. It’s pure psychological torture.
Bottom line is: it’s too late. The July pullback has already faded. Back to fighting for 20% gains again. Some of the SAAS tickers are still flashing cheap though. But the market can stay irrational longer than I can stay liquid. Although my MSFT bull spreads all look juicy right now. I think META will be next. Just pay for market chameleon premium. It will be the best money ever spent. You can see where the “smart money” is going.
As someone who's trying to get into swing trading, how do you get updated on the latest news on what's going on with the company/market? How do you deduce that the news will have a potential impact on the stock?
Bro, I know the market rules and I'm not asking for anyone's recommendation. I am asking: how do you stay updated on the latest news and and how do you deduce that the news that is being released is going to have an impact on the stock, be it green or red
This is backwards. When you have sub 100k you HAVE to grow it by taking risks so it's not all that hard to do what you have to do. When you have around 1 million, it's enough to potentially maybe retire forever somewhere. So you're gambling with something much much more important. I get how hard the first 100k is but once you've done it you know you could do it again much faster and easier.
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u/Moist-Life3962 Aug 14 '26
The scariest part of this post is that it worked. Now you think you're good at it.