Hey Dylan, been there, experienced that - 1 month ago 🙂 Things can turn good pretty quickly, and vice versa. Last month, I had 5 green days, this month so far 10 green days (and it's not even end of March..), not by accident but mostly thanks to making concrete changes, some of which you've mentioned. As long as you don't lose your capital, the main thing is to persist and keep improving. In light of that, my suggestions: 1) Sim would be best to learn and preserve your capital - I also had trouble motivating myself but what helped was that I set goals that I need to achieve to "deserve" going Live. This puts pressure on and I feel almost the same in Sim as in Live. Alternatively, if you really need real money to be able to focus, I'd suggest using a tiny R (e.g. 10 bucks). 2) You can't improve if you don't analyze your trades. Every professional sportsman in the world analyzes their wins and their losses. I'd say if you don't spend at least 30-60min per day on journaling, you won't get profitable. 3) Look at the best trades - not just in terms of R, but in terms of how you felt when trading them. Were there any that you particularly enjoyed? Don't do setups that you don't enjoy. Or tweak them so that you can find them enjoyable. 4) Try to get a feel for the market. A strategy is only a part of the picture. You should be feeling from price action that the bulls or bears are winning. 5) The win percentage suggests that the rules (gap up = long, etc.) haven't worked so far. It might be worth scrapping them if they don't help your trading. Your journal should tell you why the trades are failing, whether you should have actually taken them, and whether your entry+exit were correct. 6) Personally I've found that looking at anything smaller than 5-min chart usually results in bad trades. Try if sticking to 5-min or larger helps. I only look at 2-min once I'm sure I wanna take the trade. 7) Focus on progress, not PnL. If you see progress in your trading, then you're on a good way. If you don't see progress, that's a problem. 8. Definitely stick to Hard stops, or you can lose a lot of money with one vicious move. Hard stops are not the issue - putting them in the wrong places can be. 9) Have a pretrading routine where you repeat all your lessons and try to apply them. Include printscreens of the kind of trades that you wanna do, and also warning trades. An example from my routine is below. That's all that comes to mind for now, good luck! (although a trader doesn't need luck:) JanJ

Thanks for your answers guys. I’ve been through those risk controls, R’s, win rates and all the stats, and while this is important it did not give me the profits to live of day trading. I would like to hear from someone who is day trading for living. So far I have met more than 10 people who are doing day trading for 2+ years and non of them is day trading for living or making any significant money. I know it is possible to do it so if someone is making money I would appreciate to come out and give us all some guidance.

100% correct Peter. Good risk management allows profits with less than 50%. My stats for February were similar, c. 40% win rate but 20R profit for the whole month. This month hasn't been so good thanks to a few days mid-month when for some reason I figured I'd not be disciplined for a bit and surrendered 7R!

I also want to hear from someone who day trade for living. I have been trading for 1.5 and so far I only break even of with small profit.

Hi Dylan, J3Lda and peterB covered everything extremely well so I have nothing I could add. But I struggled with ORBs for about 1.5 years before becoming profitable, so I will mention what I have learned about ORBs. I also work full time, so the ORBs made the most sense. So I understand the desire to trade them, even though they will take longer than trend trading to become proficient. - Only trade them in SIM until profitability factor >2. Yes I agree it doesn't feel real. But that is what I needed. After going back to SIM and even trading on DAS replay I found that ORBs are more mechanical then tactical. It doesn't matter how good of a setup, you must nail the entry. It makes or breaks a great trade and could instantly turn it into a stop/out. This took me a lot of practice. You need to predict where the price will be when the order fills and not where it is currently. You can only practice that in SIM. - Video record all your ORB trades. You can look at the chart of your ABCD trade and know everything that occurred. I look at an ORB trade at night for review and I can't see what actually happen. You will learn a lot from the recording. - Give yourself a bigger stop. Even a few pennies make a difference. I use to have this in my hot key. I would pick the most logical stop and the hotkey would add a few cents. It's amazing how many trades you will be stopped out by a penny before missing the 10R run. Essentially, all of us retail traders tend to pick the same stop. So a MM can swing the price down and gobble all of us up and then move the stock. - Choose around 3 to 6 stocks and trade them every day. When one gets cold replace it with another hot stock. You need to learn the personality of individual stocks. - A little over a year ago I was making good money on ORBs based on break of daily levels. But it stopped working for me last year. But I see Thor make money every day on this so I kept trying and losing money. I finally had to drop that strategy. Same with Andrew's break of the 1 minute candle. It worked great last year and I still see Andrew make tons of money using them, but it stopped working for me and you may be having the same trouble. - To restart just choose one strategy. If the stock is setting up a different strategy, let it go without you. Just trade one strategy. Yes the number of trades will go way down, but you will become an expert in that strategy fast. Like break HOTD or 1min ORB ONLY if the candle is a hammer, or 5min ORB only if the second candle pulls back to VWAP, etc... - Yes I had a <20% success rate on ORBs for awhile. My stops were too tight, I always got a bad fill (my fault not DAS), and I always chased (now I only enter a trade on a pull back). - Just after the open I do not look at prices at all only volume. I see which stocks get the volume, then I look at the price action. - Practice watching L2 in SIM. I hope there is something here that you find useful.