Are We Living in the Golden Age of Day Trading?

It's common for people to lament that the past was the "golden age" for one thing or another, and how our current times have gone to the dogs. That may sometimes be true, though for day trading, I'm pretty sure that the past and future cannot match the opportunities we have right now.

Not that long ago, it was literally impossible for individuals to day trade. Before 1971, you needed to be physically present on the floor of a stock exchange to trade securities. The Securities and Exchange Commission eliminated fixed brokerage commissions a few more years later, lowering trading costs.

Things finally became more practical in the 1990s, when personal computers got more sophisticated, and the internet became a household word. Still, it took some time before broadband didn't cost a fortune. For example, a megabit of data in the year 2000 cost $28, and by 2020, it had dropped to 64 cents.

As a practical matter, it's only been a handful of years since the amazing tools we have today as day traders were even invented. Charting systems have become highly sophisticated and customizable, so I can see exactly the time intervals and ratios that I wish for multiple stocks in real time. Just as important, I can learn to trade in a realistic day trading simulator and build my skills for as long as necessary until I've proven that I will not be a mortal danger to my bank account. Oh, and as I wrote in a recent article, I can carry this computing power with me in a backpack and trade while traveling anywhere.

It gets better. In the old days, only the richest people had access to fresh information. Andrew Carnegie, who at one point was the richest person on earth, began his career as a telegraph clerk. He worked for people in Pittsburgh who used a telegraph line that ran to New York so they could get information and make commodity trades before the newspapers were printed and delivered. Now, we're in a world where even governments will issue official statements over social media, and company news arrives simultaneously to everyone who wants it.

Minimum account sizes have dropped, so I can day trade with a US-based account for as little as $25,000. If I want to trade in the US via an overseas account, that minimum can be as low as $500.

That brings us to the present. Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that day trading is now easy. On the contrary, I've made more than 20,000 trades in my career and I'm sorry to say that I regularly get humbled by this profession. The markets reset every day, and for some reason, they do not care in the least that they're dealing with Ross Cameron, a Professional Day Trader.

If it's a great time to trade today, you may reasonably wonder: If day trading is so good, why haven't Warren Buffett and Wall Street noticed? Why haven't they stroked checks for a few billion dollars so they can dominate the entire market?

Fair question. The answer is we're too small. If there's a curse to becoming too successful, it's that you forever need to hunt elephants. When you manage money measured in 12 or 13 digits, you must focus on spectacularly large opportunities in order to move the return needle at all.

Now consider the typical day-trading transaction. I can quickly buy and sell shares worth a few hundred thousand dollars or maybe a million. But if I try to invest much more than that, the prices will move, and my fleeting opportunity will be lost.

This is all to say that, for now, day trading flies under the radar of the big dogs. But will it stay that way?

I think not. Consider what's happening with AI. Just a few years ago, AI was some experiment housed in labs, handled by researchers in white coats. No,w it's everywhere. Not a day goes by when AI doesn't offer to summarize our emails, write reports for us, answer our questions, and even make our photos look however we want. Some AI systems in the US spend around $100 million to "train" their models, and now China's DeepSeek claims it can train its model for $6 million. Competition is driving down the cost of even this otherworldly artificial intelligence.

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I've dabbled in training AI systems to do day trading, and so far, they're not up to the task. Just like fully autonomous self-driving cars, we still have to grab the wheel sometimes in order to avoid a catastrophe. But it's pretty clear where things are headed.

Later, or maybe sooner, those systems will be smart enough to remember every single rule I can throw at them, and they'll suggest new ones. That means that the cozy little niche that we call day trading may move into the crosshairs of traders who've lowered their costs so that they can now focus on us ankle biters.

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Lots of people are making bold predictions of AI, but of course, no one knows when the next big frontier will be crossed. If my kids decide to follow in my footsteps, chances are they won't need to remember all the rules I have in my head when I evaluate a great trading opportunity. They'll have some other challenging tasks, like deciding which AI models to blend to optimize their holdings on the Mars Stock Exchange.

Fortunately, I don't have to concern myself with those lofty issues. If you're so inclined, I suggest that you and I take advantage of this current opportunity in day trading, become as good as we possibly can at it, and make hay while the sun is still out.