In life, you play the hand you are dealt. You play the best way you can, when it hands you a lemon, you make lemonade.
Unless you are playing with billions you can't play the riskless arbitrage game. Most of us have to take risks in one form or another.
Nothing is risk free for us retails. In fact, nothing is risk free in life. There is one instrument for us amateur retails that has convexity, with acceptable risks: options.
In 2023, Goldman Sachs was profitable on 213 out of 250 trading days as shown below. Source: Goldman Sachs 2023 10-K, at 107. Daytrading is profitable, maybe just not for you.
213/250? Given the type of trading they do, should have done better. They are not day trading like retail
Daily next revenues does not mean generated purely from trades open and closed the same day. Should be obvious.
In my humble opinion , day trading isn't for everyone , it's sure as hell not for me A huge part of being a good day trader is being emotionally solid , given the leverages the average day trader works at , it gets quite visceral. Not only this , remember you are going up against the smartest and best SURVIVORS of the market who are often backed by better data and huge resources. You best know its going to be tough and you have to prepare rigorously. You gotta know everyday time frame reference by heart , there's no time to check. What do you think ? Unless you're coming to trade like it's the MOST important thing in your life, you're going to get smoked. Most winning day trader have been in the market so long , that it is their second nature . It takes 0.4 seconds for a baseball pitched at 100 mph to get down the field to the batsman , he hits the ball not because he thinks , he's been playing so long that the bat is literally an extension of him . There's no time to think , there's no time to check. Also in my humble opinion, you need to not day trade indexes as they have too many components which doesn't easily allow for unidirectional movement ,and can get quite choppy , witnessing chop near your entry at 10x leverage is very frustrating. Whereas i notice individual stocks and commodities have their own destinies in relation to the broader market. My biggest payouts while trading have always been trading individual names . My biggest loses while day trading have been day trading the index. But to me rather risk that same 20 points on a more pronounced longer term move that usual is between days or weeks. However, no matter how long the time frame you trade is , the day you establish a position you are a day trader, you either got the best price of the day or mediocre price. a good day trader is a master of the craft , don't get it twisted for a second. There are very profitable day traders out there , they are aliens . not literally but they are very cold blooded and totally opportunistic, they just keep working on getting better and better.. well the ones who survive anyways.
I got into daytrading after being seduced by all the false marketing. Needless to say, I sucked at daytrading (and short term trading in general). After some soul crushing results, I confided my frustrations to a mentor, his response changed everything for me. He said: "Do you want to be a daytrader or do you want to make a living from financial markets?" His words slapped the daytrading illusion right out of me. I changed my focus to a much longer holding period and haven't looked back.