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Walked away from 20 years of software development last year. I've been day and swing trading stocks for last 2 years. I'm now trading full time and doing grea

• matsemann 5y ago
  Sorry for the blunt question, but how does it feel to go from something where you make something valuable to ...that? (At least I feel what I do give me meaning)
  • emteycz 5y ago
    Providing liquidity to the market is valuable too, as well as rapid reallocation of capital where it's needed. Not to say there aren't differences, of course. But I feel like your comparison is condescending. These people do valuable work too.
    • einpoklum 5y ago
      Stock traders don't "provide" anything, they're just playing a part in a poor, and exploitation-buttressing, system of exchange and resource allocation.
      • swalsh 5y ago
        That's a very shortsighted view.
        • amelius 5y ago
          Shortsightedness is exactly the problem with daytrading.
          • emteycz 5y ago
            Well don't daytrade if you're shortsighted, for sure. But if you think daytraders can afford to be shortsighted, you're very wrong - it's one of the most exposed professions in this regard, the market will react weeks or months in anticipation of an event.
  • goncaloo 5y ago
    Most developers work on meaningless, "make the rich richer", products anyways
    • kimsant 5y ago
      But you can find something meaningful (very easy), or start your own business (easiest moment in history to rise 1million), or teach in a bootcamp... There are 100 options. Wasting a wonderfull mind just because... sad
      • sam_lowry_ 5y ago
        Dunno, finding something meaningful to work on has been really hard for me, personally. It's either a big drop in revenue or bullshit projects
      • ctvo 5y ago
        What a load of shit. This is the same mindset folks who pop up to yell at some Google engineers have. Why are you using your skills to collect data for adtech! You could be helping bring clean drinking water to the world! People value what they value, and should be able to work in fields that bring them happiness and don’t break the law without your judgement. Who are you to tell anyone what’s meaningful?
        • tux3 5y ago
          It's unfortunate that adtech enjoys less popularity than bringing clean drinking water to the world. That's really a tragedy and the main thing wrong with the world. I wish I could do wildly unpopular things without people criticizing me. Who the hell is everyone else, to dare judge me? I am above judgement.
          • ctvo 5y ago
            Or you know, do the polite thing and keep quiet? The sentiments from you, and the original post I was replying to, have inherent privilege baked into them. A South Asian person with family who depends on them for remittances is ignored. A family with a child with special needs that require specific health insurance coverage is ignored. There are so many reasons people do the work they do. Presumably you think people who work in adtech, for example, are somehow morally inferior. It's this sophomoric view of the world that's bothersome. To tell anyone they should consider teaching at a coding bootcamp instead of what they're doing ... I have no words. I'd love to hear how these folks are changing the world for the better. It's much easier to tell others what they should do with their time and money.
  • taormina 5y ago
    Hey, if you were working in advertising or crypto, you’re probably about breakin even in the “meaningfulness” department
    • nerdponx 5y ago
      I'd argue that daytrading is less of a net negative for the world than working on ad tech software.
      • mgh2 5y ago
        ads and fake news fuel daytrading, same side of the coin
  • tonmoy 5y ago
    Don’t know about GP’s details, but IMO trading brings quite a lot of value to society especially compared to at least some non-sense tick the box software jobs. Trending brings liquidity and makes resources available to where it is needed.
  • usremane 5y ago
    The term valuable is subjective. What really matters is whether you are happy in whatever you’re doing. People who make good money in trading are mostly going to spend some too somewhere which indirectly puts food on table for others.
  • PerilousD 5y ago
    When I first started out I actually got to develop, write and deploy complete applications as opposed to endless updates or tiny sections of some larger project. It was an amazing feeling seeing something you write being run by dozens or even hundreds of users around the world. If the code you write today is meaningful to you that's great but its been a LONG time since I could look at something running that I wrote and feel any sense of ownership in the deal. I used to tell my team - when we have a bad day something crashes or doesnt work right. When my wife has a bad day somebody may have died literally (she's a nurse). Perspective!
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • Cloudef 5y ago
    Tbh, i dont really feel i ever do anything valuable with software either
    • matsemann 5y ago
      Fair enough, and probably more people feel that way? Not all tech is good tech, especially not if one follows the money. But I feel the stuff I've done in my career have had a direct impact on people's lives, but perhaps it's because I self select for those kind of projects because that matters to me?
  • dageshi 5y ago
    Mastering something like trading to the point where you can earn a living from it is probably pretty meaningful to a lot of people.
  • JKCalhoun 5y ago
    My guess is that you do the more "meaningful things" in your spare time. Likely day trading affords you a little more of that?
  • 55555 5y ago
    Giving back to the world is just one way to be satisfied. Being great at something, or even just learning, are often sufficient.
  • city41 5y ago
    In my twenty year dev career I can count the meaningful projects on just a few fingers.
  • kirso 5y ago
    Have been thinking a lot about this. There are more ways to make an impact, such as earning a good salary and re-investing / donating to build trees, renewables or serve any of the UNDP goals that are helping society. In fact that is probably more impactful that personally picking fruit in the garden. I guess it just depends on the place itself not being generally net negative to society compared to the impact you can make with it. Here is a good primer: https://80000hours.org/ https://80000hours.org/
• sandoze 5y ago
  Here’s the thing. If I could just code without being a slave to a scrum master or being product micromanaged.. I would never leave the industry. I worked five years in mobile gaming when the Apple Store first opened. Released 13 titles, had my hands in a half a dozen others, three teams in two countries, 15 employees at our height (95% remote). Never had a standup, planning meaning, grooming.. etc.
  • JKCalhoun 5y ago
    I'm surprised you made it 5 years. It seemed like the App Store collapsed to free within a year or two.
    • dylan604 5y ago
      You make it sound like there's no money to be made in Apps, but that's clearly obvious to not be true. Switched to freemium with In App Purchases is the model I see every where, and I am constantly amazed at the fact that $0.99, $1.99, etc are paid multiple times by the user to the point that they could have bought a AAA console new release with the IAP paid. These apps also include ad sales to the IAPs. The money no longer needs to come from the initial download.
    • sandoze 5y ago
      We made the switch from paid, to ad driven, to freemium/IAP for our in-house games. Zynga was one of our biggest clients. Hasbro came in second. As well as a few white label advergames (eg. Vans shoes). We rarely made more than a small cut on profits (if that) and were generally paid upfront and on delivery.
  • 2bitlobster 5y ago
    What were your main means of coordination and planning?
    • sandoze 5y ago
      We knew what needed to be built. Sometimes it was easy, we were doing a direct port, other times product and design would write it up in somewhat detailed documentation (can you believe no stories/tasks?!). Because they were games you’d start with the play loops and continually tweak them. Assets would come in from designers throughout the lifecycle of the project and they’d just document what they wanted to see (fonts, colors, animations, flow). We had a product manager who would regularly play our builds and speak with the clients. If the clients were unhappy, had feedback, or found bugs, he would chat or hop on a call with the lead developer (usually me). We’d write it on a sticky note or put it in our mind palace as a Todo (or if you were a defensive programmer and planned that a certain piece of code needs to be flexible, you were fixing it while he was explaining the problem). So, we had communication, but not in the form of formal meetings. Product set the delivery dates, we set goals/cadence as engineers around those dates, and based off of continual feedback we iterated on the design.
• mancerayder 5y ago
  That's brave, given the odds. Having gotten into options recently myself, I'm curious if there was some research or reading materials that you found particularly helpful in your ramp up to trading full time. Also do you try to close out every position by close of business each day or is there a longer term approach?
• akulbe 5y ago
  I would love to talk with you more about this. You open to conversation?
• barbarbar 5y ago
  How do you deal with the stress related to trading? Isn't it hard mentally when it goes "not your way"?
• k8sToGo 5y ago
  How much did you need to make day trading worth?
• ryandrake 5y ago
  Good luck to you! I remember back in the late 90's / early 2000's when The Stock Market Only Goes Up, and 1/4 of my software peers quit to "become day traders." Well when the bear market inevitably came, I started seeing them back in scrum meetings... Do your due diligence and and preserve your capital :)
  • JKCalhoun 5y ago
    I remember. So easy to day trade when everything was going up, ha ha.
    • neilv 5y ago
      I remember this too. I decided I'd only try it with $1K. Soon, I'd tripled my money (despite trading fees), decided that I'd proven I could do it, and then put it all for long-term into a company I liked and believed in (Red Hat). Later, I learned that winning being easy was the nature of the market at the time, rather than it being a personal achievement worth proving. I also was lucky that I didn't discover a compulsive/addictive weakness for the activity, which could've turned a $1K experiment into personal ruin.
  • hutrdvnj 5y ago
    A good day trader is able to shift gears in case of a bear market e.g. knows when to short. Very few days traders are actually good, most lose money and quit after some months.
  • shoo 5y ago
    It can be very difficult to look at the realised outcome and disentangle how much of that outcome was driven by decision making, and how much was due to variability of factors entirely outside of your control, i.e. "luck". What if your decision making is poor and over-fitted to current conditions that are not guaranteed to persist, but you keep (temporarily) winning anyway? Taleb writes about this kind of thing in Fooled by Randomness. Poker player Annie Duke's book "thinking in bets" also goes into it. I reckon to some extent public market conditions in recent years since GFC have approximately been "stock market only goes up" with a few small fluctuations from covid, negative oil price weirdness, etc. Lots of investors trying desperately to invest cash in recent years pouring money into variety of highly speculative areas -- SPACs, crypto, fraudulent EV companies (Nikola rolling their "truck" down the hill to make it look like it was self propelled, lol). At some point the music will stop.
• dplgk 5y ago
  I've been exploring day trading recently and have not yet found the angle that works for me and also fits my lifestyle/budget. It's hard to find reliable sources of education on the topic because it seems like so many materials are teaching hindsight technical analysis that looks good on paper but is really just BS to sell a e-book or Discord subscription. I'm still exploring what time frames I want to trade and if I should go with option strategies or stock scalping. Do you have any advice for learning materials?
  • nigerian1981 5y ago
    That’s because it’s a fancy word for gambling
  • hutrdvnj 5y ago
    The best way of day trading is to exploit a market inefficiency that nobody (or very few) are aware of. As soon as this inefficiency is know to public it will disappear, that's why there is not much sensible material for day trading to learn from, maybe except for the psychological aspect, which is very important. Try to find a system that works for you and be quiet about it. Unfortunately, 95%< of day traders didn't find a system that works and quit after some time.
  • pid-1 5y ago
    The best way to learn trading is to work for an investment bank / hedge fund and learn from folks who already do that successfully. Anything else is likely BS.
  • telcal 5y ago
    For about a year I've been watching a guy on Twitch (in the background while working my real job) who day trades everyday. I thought TA was BS but I was wrong. I've learned a ton from just watching/listening and after paper trading for 8 months I'm now comfortable using real money. You're right though almost everything out there is BS selling a book/newsletter/chat room. (Twitch streamer = StockJock)
• kimsant 5y ago
  Sad to hear that top minds just give up on humanity and accept money as a goal by itself. I do have long term investments (5 nanometers, extreme litography, electric vehicles... just what I love), I make money, but is not something I need to live. Last month, when war started I told my team, Aerovironment stock, is gonna double (war drones) but I'm not gonna be part and I want you all to feel how calmed I'm about that and undertand (I don't need those 100k). I now undertand the difference between being Socrates or a 'sofist' (greek philosophs both, one for pleasure, the second as a job). Investing shouldn't be a need, is what's best for humanity. I think Elon musk already refered this way
  • draw_down 5y ago
• iamgopal 5y ago
  Day trading doesn’t work. What is your secret ? You can make millions selling your book.
  • filoleg 5y ago
    Well, that's the catch. Those who actually consistently make money daytrading (averaged out over a long enough time period) don't have a need to write those books (and potentially put themselves at a disadvantage by doing so) to make money. While those who write "daytrading secrets" books typically make heavy majority of their money from those books, because they cannot make money from actual daytrading.
  • telcal 5y ago
    I thought so too but it really can work if you have the right emotional mindset and stick to your game plan. There are streamers who do it live to prove it.
• 55555 5y ago
  What are some of the resources and communities you use for trading?
• lazyeye 5y ago
  Sounds lika fun way to earn a living. Just dont be this guy https://www.reddit.com/r/fatFIRE/comments/ti1jg8/i_owe_nearly_half_a_million_in_capital_gains_tax/?sort=confidence https://www.reddit.com/r/fatFIRE/comments/ti1jg8/i_owe_nearl...
• billsmithwicks 5y ago
  What would you need to get into day trading, properly, as a full time job? I'm certain that bank defaulter lists are filled with mediocre day traders, so without asking what's your secret, what's your secret?
• RickJWagner 5y ago
  I wish you great luck, but please be cautious. I'll never forget the great crash of 2000. Among the signs I should have seen-- I knew a guy from my bowling league who quit his job to day trade. I don't know what your qualifications are for this line of work, but this guy had no discernible skills. He was doing fine 'till the big crash, then he was wiped out. Please be safe.