Does anyone do on line Day Trading ?

[recall]

I have been paper trading for 6 months now, and on paper am extremely successful. I use the CMC platform. I am getting psyched up to start live trading - I plan to do several very tiny managed trades a day. I started the demo account with £300 000, and it is now up to £1.101M. (if only it were real) I'm presuming that when it goes live I just carry on what I'm doing but obviously with the 000s knocked off the end. I am currently saving £1000 to get started.

Just wondered if anyone else had any experience/advice about this.

before you start day trading for real, could you do this:

Spend all day long in William Hill's or Paddy Power, studing form and placing a bet, making a winning and taking those winnings and place another bet, do that half a dozen times, at one point in that cycle you'll loose either all or some of the money. Could you only take part of the winnings and re-bet it, withdrawing a potion each time to cover a loss.

Will you be watching bloomberg, cnn and the BBC World news all at the same time. As well as being able to react quickly to news as a market fluctuates.

How much do you know about either the market type your going to be targeting, or the companies you'll be targeting. How comfortable are you with your portfolio.

Do you understand technical analysis, candle sticks and leafs

Can you make a small pile of five pound notes totalling a grand and set fire to it and walk away from it.

Have you read Reminiscences of a Stock Operator. It may have been written at the turn of the last century but the information is as valid now as it was then. Do you use the Motley Fool forums?

If you answer yes to all that... go for it

recall i used to kind of day trade about 12/13 yrs ago and done quite well out of it. i didnt use any kind of system, just went with my own research and done a lot of reading etc. i started with about 1500 and it built up quickly but at that time tech stocks were going through the roof and you could literally close your eyes and stick in a pin in the middle of the FT, buy something and you would make money - its not as easy as that nowadays.

I think your model of having 300,000 to start with is a little one sided - its easy to make good money if you have a lot of money in the first place, so if you buy something which costs you 100,000k its easy to make 5k on it - although youve made 5k its only 5% of your investment. where its harder is making good money on a small amount of money - if you only have 1k to invest and make 5% its only 50.

i made a lot of friends through it but i was always amazed at how many people were manipulating stocks, there was always a whisper or a rumour - some things i was told came true, some things were bogus - be careful who you trust and who you listen to esp. on forums like motley fool...

i would like to get into it again but dont have enough time to give it though i still buy and sell a little its not nearly as much as i used to. good luck though, i would be interested to hear how you get on.

the best way to make a million dollars on the stock market is to start with ten million dollars

ONLY invest what you can afford to lose in total

Heard of someone I know doing this with an inheritance and was told she was doing really well.However no evidence of success as they still live in the same house and appear to have the same lifestyle, no new kitchen, extension new car expensive holidays etc so not sure how successful its been. Essentially it is a gamble.

I know someone who did this, she did really well at first then, you guessed it, it all went wrong. They had to pull the kids out of private school plus move to a smaller house. The worst thing was that her partner had no idea what she was gambling.

Dont invest more than you can afford to lose.

And, playing sim city never made me a city planner.

Well, I was a real trader once, with a $100m portfolio (Asian collared floaters was my thing). Ah, them was the days.

I'd say if you know how to price volatility, understand what bootstrapping means and can rattle off the Greeks and know how to value them, then you're in with a chance. If not then you are making money through an element of luck that can easily change.

Over time even the best fund managers struggle to substantially outperform the FTSE, and professional 'prop' traders in banks (they're the gambling ones, rather than the brokering ones) generally make money by becoming very very specialised in a very small sector.

I wish you every success and imagine it could be a lot of fun doing this as a hobby, but pleased don't punt life-altering amount of money on this, because without specialisation and luck you may not do well over the longer term.

I've been using Barclays Stockbrokers for about 6 years, the website is very easy to use. Day trading does take up quite a lot of time, I have the news on all the time and it is very stressy. I only deal in bank shares as I find following to many different shares doesn't work for me. Investing small amounts can be quite hard to make a profit because of fees to buy and sell and tax.