Why Trade Intraday? Go To Las Vegas Instead!!!

Hey Folks! I hope you are doing good. I was searching on the internet and found an excellent article about Intraday Trading. I thought, I should share it with you. The title is “Why trade intraday? Go to Las Vegas Instead!!!” In this article, the writer has written 8 reasons why most intraday traders fail. I feel you should know these 8 reasons before you enter this intraday trading.

Read this article and share your feedback in the comment box about how you feel about these reasons and the steps you are following to overcome these intraday trading. Here is the article:

Everyone wants to earn money and that too quickly. Let me tell you a best-case scenario:

• You wake up in the morning all excited about the money you are going to make via day trading.
• You get in front of your system sharp at 09:00 am.
• You make a trade of Rs. 20,000 with a 5X exposure at 09:15 am.
• Your security goes up by 5% at 09.30 am and suddenly you are richer by Rs. 1000!!!
• This continues for the 250 odd yearly trading days, and you happily accumulate close to Rs. 2.5 lakhs.
• Lastly, the best part is that you are now earning more than 2.3 times the per capita GDP of our country and that too by devoting less than 150 odd hours in the entire year.

That’s great, right?

No, not at all! This has a 99% chance of becoming a nightmare you wouldn’t be able to forget for a very long time.

Two very important things are yet to be considered before you start intraday trading as a source of side income or maybe a full-time thing.

Firstly, this was a best-case scenario that did not consider the time allocated for research, and secondly the hidden expenses. We’ll discuss more on this after some time.

To be clear, this time we are going all guns blazing against intraday trading and hope that by the end of this article, even you will start advocating the concept! Rather than giving you examples this time, we’ll directly start with why intraday trading doesn’t work the way you want it to!

I’m sure you might have heard the statistics that 97% of intraday traders lose money, 2% manage to make a living out of it and only 1% actually make money! Yes, those numbers are harshly spot on. It is that 1% population that lets everyone know about their feat and creates a sort of illusion – that anyone can do what they just did!

Consider for a moment that everyone in that 95% category started following the ‘so-called-rules’ including the 1-1.5% stop loss protocol toted out by the 1% lot who now consider themselves as market gurus. So, what happens next? Stop-loss orders would trigger all over the market and prices would inflate and deflate just as they do now.

In simpler words, everyone trying to do the same right thing facilitates the same market movements when they are doing their own wrong thing. The point is, it doesn’t matter how people trade or if everyone traded the same way… most would still lose like they are losing now.

Why trade Intraday?

When we discuss this with our clients, we get a lot of resistance. Some say that if intraday trading is so unbecoming, why do the Dalal Street and Wall Street professionals day-trade all the time? Are they so absurd? Here’s what they missed out:

1. Most of these traders are trained professionals who get paid to day-trade using other people’s money. Apart from that cushion of not using their own money, they earn a fixed percentage on the total traded amount as well on the profit. On the other hand, the average retail trader trades using her/his own money. So, they not only have to break even but also bear the costs of brokerages, taxes, information, etc.
2. Secondly, the most important thing that matters is the difference between the resources a Dalal Street professional and a stay-at-home intraday trader have at their disposal. The skills, the privilege to first-hand information, the tools, the cushion of not gambling with their own money, etc is what the latter can only dream of. This makes this competition like a college football team against, say Manchester United FC. Will it be possible for them to win? Yes. But it is highly unlikely (1 in 1000 cases).

Intraday Trading is a zero-sum, in fact, a negative-sum game if you factor in the commissions and service costs. Every paisa earned by one trader comes out of the pocket of another. In most cases, the average retail traders belong to the latter category. Think about it by yourself, given the resources, the chances of Dalal Street professionals losing is very low and their winnings have to come from somewhere, which is why they thank you for playing with them!

Finally, we’ll come to the part where we say that it is better to go to Vegas and gamble or simply work at McDonald’s than to day-trade! Apart from the above-mentioned reasons of how illogical it is to compete with the professionals, intraday trading is a ‘dumb’ job. Yes, you read that right, it is actually a dumb thing to do which ensures that you lose money almost all the time (considering a 1-year horizon here). Have a look at 8 such reasons:

1) Intraday trading = Pure gambling

It might be fun to day-trade just like gambling, but it is nothing less than it, in fact, worse. Like you learn nothing when you gamble, you literally learn nothing from intraday trading also. But unlike gambling, you pay hefty fees irrespective of how much money you make or lose.

2) Hope becomes your strategy and Uncertainty becomes your best friend

You are a retail trader with no great resources at your disposal. Thus, you are bound to get to a point where you ‘hope’ you don’t get ruined and this is where you should realize that you have something wrong! Hoping is not a bad thing, but if it’s the only thing you rely on, means you haven’t considered all the possible outcomes. Remember, hoping for good things to happen is the most powerful as well as the most forgotten prayer.

3) You take too many or too fewer risks

Some traders take too many risks and go bankrupt and some people are just too cautious. Both do not fit the day-trading job! Some people are so afraid of a risk that they end up booking small profits which are all wiped out by one single loss.

4) Intraday trading takes a toll on your health

It pulls everything out of your life. One bad trade and you don’t sleep well, you don’t eat well and you don’t feel well! This goes on and on and you suddenly become depressed with your life. The only question here is, WHY?

5) You develop a thing called ‘commitment bias’ and make Greed your no. 1 enemy

When you trade intraday and it doesn’t work out, even when your heart wants it to, you simply start averaging. You think, just because you’ve already put in your time, energy, and money, you should stick to the plan no matter what; and eventually, end up losing more.

It is at times like these when your margin based portfolio gets wiped out if you are not lightning fast! Consider the following scenario:

As in the above-given table, if your portfolio is margined with 4/5th of the money borrowed from the broker, a 5% decline in the price of your stock as in the case I, will result in a 25% decline in the portfolio. Simply put, an x% decline in the stock price will result in a 5x% erosion of your wealth.

The situation worsens when the exposure given by the brokers increase. What we fail to understand is no one but the broker is the winner here. You, on the other hand, are not only paying him interest on the money borrowed but a ~0.05-0.1% brokerage (approx Rs. 150) and some ‘hidden’ taxes for intraday trading as follows: (case 1 considered)

1. Service Tax of 14.5% + Swachh Bharat Cess of 0.5% + Krishi Kalyan Cess of 0.5% (applicable from June 2016) which is applied on the brokerage. (Updated Mar 2016) i.e. approx Rs. 24
2. STT (Security Transaction Tax) of 0.025% is only on the selling amount i.e. approx Rs. 24
3. Stamp Duty on the total turnover for the day which is 0.002% i.e. approx Rs. 4
4. And finally Regulatory Charges on the total turnover for a day which is 0.004% i.e. Rs. 8

Also, you have to pay a 15% tax on the profits you’ve made via intraday trading over a period of one year. So the initial brokerage+tax accounts to Rs. 210 for the day. Well, that’s pinching!

7) You start getting desperate for the so-called tips!

Another big threat to aspiring day-traders is from the community of fraud tipsters. Tips from these fake research companies who sometimes don’t even have real analysts can lead to more and more losses, but, there’s more to it. You try to pin that blame on these tip providers instead of analyzing the causes for your loss. Yes, you will feel victimized here, but it won’t stop your losses from continuing!

8) What if trading fails? What next?

Suppose you give in everything for day-trading, you do all the research, you follow all the protocols and you still don’t get lucky! What will you do next? At one point, you will have to quit, and when you do so, all the time and effort you’ve put in will count for nothing. In fact:

It will be like you’ve lost all those months or years. There’s no going back!

But on the other hand, if you had dedicated that time doing a real job, like at McDonald’s (no offense), you could at least use that experience for a better opportunity in the future.

Just for your information, McDonald’s average hourly pay is around $4/hour i.e. instead of day-trading, if you work at this fast-food chain for 3 hours a day, you will end up earning approximately Rs. 800.

Shocking right? Also, you could just go to Las Vegas or any casino for that matter and simply blow off your money. Who knows, you might get lucky once in a while, but you at least know that the chances are negligible.

Remember, if it’s a bull market, everyone’s a hero. Else, this approach has its own huge drawbacks and a 100% (well almost 100%) chance of eroding your wealth. Real money is made by holding stocks and not trading them.

This is where there’s a huge chance of you getting fooled by the self-named ‘TV Experts’. The same experts, who suggest you to buy a stock when it has peaked out, will advise you to sell it after it has made the lows.

All they can do is follow the tail. If they were actually good at it, they wouldn’t have done it for free. So beware.

When markets are tried to be understood, the idea that everyone can make money is not only inaccurate but impossible and laughable. Everyone making money means there is no market, because who would be taking the other side of the trade? Our job is to make sure that you are on the right side of it! Keep in mind that most traders lose money because the market requires them to do so.

You will most likely hear more stories of people making it big by intraday trading rather than hearing about people losing everything. Those rarest of the rare success stories will make you believe you have that one special something that will make it work for you, but it won’t.

There are no shortcuts to anything in the world, especially making money in the stock market. So take a step back if you are into it and make the right choice!

This content was originally published here.

So here is the question for you. What precautions you are following to overcome these obstacles in Intraday trading? Share them in the comment box.

Now the most important thing:

After reading this article, I hope you have a conviction that one should avoid intraday trading.

But I have a different perspective here. Although Intraday trading is the toughest trading style and 90% of traders lose money in it 10% still make money because of their right mindset, approach and discipline.

If you have the right approach with the right mindset, nothing is impossible same as intraday trading too. In intraday trading, our biggest enemy is "Human Emotions" like fear and greed. If you can avoid it, you can become part of those 10% intraday traders.

You don't need a holy grail but need a simple strategy with the right execution tool that can avoid human emotions. This is what I've been doing for the last 8 years.

And that's why I have created a small course to teach what I'm doing most simply.

In this course, I don't talk about the theory but the important data points that one needs to make Intraday trading profitable.

Here are the details of the course:

In this course, I have shared 7+ Rule-Based Option Strategies that you can run on auto-pilot through some algo trading tool.

You will learn:

• 5+ Intraday Option Selling Strategies for Nifty and BankNifty
• 3+ Intraday Option Buying Strategies for Nifty and BankNifty
• Trend-following setup with in-house builds Excel sheet.
• Position Sizing and Money Management in Intraday Trading
• Live Market session to find intraday trends and execute trades.

As I shared earlier, this course is not about theory. This course is all about practical knowledge with the simplest method that even a beginner can follow.

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