If you’re smart, disciplined, and savvy, you can make day-trading your job and earn over $1,000 a week with a relatively low investment and fairly low risk.
This great article from Vantage Point Trading really breaks it down to fundamentals so you know what you’re getting yourself into.
How Much Money Can I Make Day Trading Stocks?
Day trading stocks is probably the most well-known day trading market, but it is also the most capital-intensive. In the USA you must have at least $25,000 in your day trading account, otherwise you can’t trade (see: How Much Money Do I Need to Become a Day Trader). To stay above this threshold, fund your account with more than $25,000.
Assume you start trading with $30,000. You use 4:1 leverage, which gives you $120,000 in buying power (4 x $30,000). You utilize a strategy that makes you $0.15 on winning trades and you lose $0.10 on losing trades. This is about a 1.5:1 reward to risk ratio.
With a $30,000 account, the absolute most you can risk on each trade is $300 (1% of $30,000). Since your stop loss is $0.10, you can take a position size of 3000 shares (the stock will need to be priced below $40 in order to take this position size, otherwise you won’t have enough buying power). To get those types of stats from a trade, you’ll likely need to trade stocks that have decent volatility and lots of volume (see How to Find Volatile Stocks for Day Trading).
A good trading system will win 50% of the time. You average 5 trades per day, so if you have 20 trading days in a month, you make 100 trades per month.
50 of them were profitable: 50 x $0.15 x 3000 shares = $22,500
50 of them were unprofitable: 50 x $0.10 x 3000 shares = ($15,000)
You net $7,500, but you still have commissions and possibly some other fees. While this is likely on the high-end, assume your cost per trade is $20 (total, to get in and out). Your commission costs are: 100 trades x $20 =$2000. If you pay for your charting/trading platform, or exchange entitlements then those fees are added in as well.
Therefore, with a decent stock day trading strategy, and $30,000 (leveraged at 4:1), you can make roughly:
$7,500 – $2000 = $5,500/month or about a 18% monthly return.
How Much Money Day Traders Can Make (Stocks, Forex and Futures)