magnified money: day trading with $10,000 - the real experience & results

Towards the end of last year, I was tired of seeing endless ads for day trading courses and I wanted to see if it was actually possible to make money day trading stocks. So I bought some of the most popular day trading courses and funded a separate account with $10,000. And today I'm going to show you what happened and give you my honest opinion on day trading and if I think it's actually a viable way to make income. Let's jump right into it. What is going on everyone? Welcome back to my channel. If you're new here, be sure to subscribe if you want to see more videos like this in the future. And of course, let me know if there's a video topic that you want me to cover down in the comment section below. So like I said, towards the end of last year, I was for some reason getting bombarded with advertisements for different day trading courses. And as a long-term investor myself, I always clicked off of them pretty quickly, believing that it was just another internet guru trying to take my money. Eventually, I gave into the endless ads and purchased the course of a YouTuber who had shown up on my recommended page a number of times. And that was Ricky Gutierrez's Learn Plan Profit course. If you aren't familiar with Ricky Gutierrez, he's a YouTuber who currently has over 700,000 subscribers and he's famous for day trading and investing in various other markets. So after watching a few of his videos, I wanted to see if it was all a hoax or if it was really possible to make the large profits that he was bragging about. So after ripping the band-aid and making an extremely impulsive $300 purchase, I was now enrolled in Learn Plan Profit. The course includes hours of video content, as well as access to a Discord chat with other members and live trading sessions every morning. So I eagerly rushed through all of the videos in about a week and ignored the very strong recommendation to paper trade before trading with actual money. If you don't know, paper trading is essentially a real-world stock market game that allows you to practice recognizing patterns and trading without risking your real money. But as I said, I ignored these warnings that would have likely been extremely helpful, but hindsight is always 20-20, especially when day trading. So after watching a few of his live training sessions and going through the course material, I finally worked up the courage to take my first day trade. Now, keep in mind that this was by no means my first time buying a stock. However, it was my first time using TD Ameritrade's rather intimidating thinkorswim platform with the intention of selling the stock the same day that I purchased it. So thinking I would be buying my new McLaren by next week, I hastily bought my first day trade and bought 214 shares of DGAZ, which is an inverse leveraged ETF correlated to natural gas. All it means is that this is an exchange trade fund ETF, and it's leveraged three times, meaning that if a normal natural gas ETF changed 1%, then this ETF DGAZ would go up 3%, making it much, much riskier. But you got to get those profits. The inverse part just means that DGAZ does the opposite of the ETF pattern UGAZ. So when DGAZ goes up, UGAZ goes down and vice versa. Not important to the story, but I wanted to make sure you understood. Thankfully, I was smart enough not to use the entire $10,000 that I had set aside for this experiment. But surprisingly, luck was on my side for my very first trade, and the price quickly rose from $14.85 per share to $15.79 per share. After earning the stock for about 10 minutes, I sold my first day trade for a profit of $187. Thinking I was some sort of day trading guru, I quickly looked for my next purchase and decided on a similar ETF known as DRIP, which tracks oil. So thinking I knew it all, I purchased 877 shares of this leveraged ETF. But my luck had clearly run out and the price quickly dropped, leading to the most gut-wrenching sense of panic that most investors are familiar with. Thankfully, I held on for about half an hour and eventually sold for a whopping profit of $0.88. Of course, I quickly forgot about the fact that I had almost lost several hundred dollars in a matter of minutes, and I walked away from my first day as a day trader thinking I might as well drop out of college. So I continued day trading between classes with varying levels of success, and after about three months, I netted a total profit of $1,155. And to anyone thinking that that's pretty good, let me remind you that this included several painful losses in the amount of $100, $145, and a rather impressive $170 loss that happened over about two and a half minutes. That being said, I wrapped up 2019 pleasantly surprised and feeling like I really knew what I was doing. As a result, I decided to add some more money to the experimental account going into 2020, and I jumped right back in when the market opened on January 2nd. To start off 2020, I purchased $11,000 worth of DWT and sold it for a $460 profit in a matter of minutes. Two days later, I purchased $12,000 worth of UGAZ and somehow sold that for a profit of $370 after seven minutes. Needless to say, 2020 started off pretty strong and I was feeling good about this experiment. But unfortunately, my luck eventually ran out as it does with many new day traders. The following days consisted of several losses well above $200 each, and I capped off January with a $14,000 purchase of UGAZ that I sold three minutes later for a $437 loss. It was after that that I decided it was time to end this little experiment as I never even thought it would last as long as it did. All in all, I walked away with about $2,000 in profit after day trading for about four months. And while from a percentage standpoint, that is pretty great, the level of stress and time that it took to earn this money was not worth it for me. So how do I feel about day trading and do I really think it is possible to consistently make money like Ricky and other famous day traders talk about? If I'm being 100% honest, yes, I do think it's possible, but I wouldn't say it's realistic. I will be the first to say that Ricky's course is honestly pretty comprehensive and his charismatic personality does give you a high level of confidence when you're trading. Whether that's him making the sale or a genuine level of care is for you to decide, but I honestly did enjoy the process, but simply did not have the consistent schedule that is really needed to make rapid trading decisions. Before I emptied my experimental account and went back to my trustworthy index funds, I wanted to try out another popular course that I'm sure you have seen advertisements here on YouTube for, and that is Jason Bond Picks. Now this phase did not last nearly as long as the previous one, but I did purchase his $500 course and stock picking service as I was curious and wanted to compare it to Ricky's course. Unlike my opinion on LearnPlan Profit, I can confidently say that you should not purchase the Jason Bond Picks program. Again, is it possible to make money doing what he says? Absolutely, but it becomes very obvious how he and his top level clients make money once you're actually in the program. Unlike Ricky's program that we talked about earlier, Jason Bond sends out constant alerts telling you specifically what stocks he is buying. While this may sound great to a new trader, it's all a scheme to help pump the stocks that he and his top level clients are buying. Now I have no legitimate proof of this, but again, it's pretty obvious what's going on once you're actually in the course and there's plenty of research online that backs up this theory. After he and his top level clients buy into a momentum stock at a low price, he sends out the alerts to thousands of his lower level clients, knowing that they'll immediately log on and buy that stock, seeing it's rising quickly. His lower level clients see the stock price rising quickly and have the fear of missing out. And as a result, they panic buy, which only causes the price to go up even more. Jason and his top level clients sit back waiting to sell their shares that they bought in at an absolute bottom price. And eventually they do sell high volume and it causes the price to crash pretty quickly. Anyone who knows anything about the history of the stock market might recognize this particular pattern as it's very similar to a certain individual who had a certain movie made about them. Now, this is not meant to be any sort of call out or exposing Jason Bond because it's pretty obvious what's going on here. And it's not necessarily illegal, but I just want you to know that this program is very different than other programs like Ricky Gutierrez's Learn Plan Profit. So at the end of the day, if you have some extra cash lying around and you're curious, then I would never discourage you from trying day trading, but you better use money that you are 100% okay with losing and can afford to lose. I'm not saying it is a smart thing to do or a wise investment by any stretch of the imagination. But for those of us that are interested in technical patterns of the stock market, it can be a lot of fun with a little bit of practice. That being said, please do not go day trade your life savings down the You probably are better off going to Vegas and putting it all on black if that's what you're going to do. Something like 95% of day traders lose money and those who come out ahead likely have years and years of experience. You might get lucky a few times like I did, but eventually, your luck will probably run out and you'll go running back to your reliable index funds just like I did. There's really no way to predict where the stock market will be in 10 minutes, 10 days, or even 10 months from now. If there really was a way to predict the short-term changes in the market, then it would probably be common knowledge and everyone would be thriving day traders. But unfortunately, it's not that simple. So if you want a legitimate long-term investment, then just stick with the consistent long-term investment in index funds. You've heard it before, but just buy a few different index funds, reinvest the dividends, and you'll start stacking money pretty quickly. At the end of the day, it's nearly impossible to beat this statistically in the long term. If you do want to try out day trading and just want an easy-to-use investing app, click the Robinhood link in the description and you'll get a free stock valued at up to $250 and it will also help support my channel and I really appreciate it. Don't forget to subscribe for more videos like this in the future and smash the like button if you enjoyed the video. As always, let me know if you have any questions down in the comment section below. Thank you so much for your time, take it easy, and I'll see you in the next one.