How Much Do Day Traders Make? What the Research Actually Found
How much day traders make has been measured on whole markets, and most lose money. In Brazil, 97% of people who day traded futures for over 300 days lost money; in Taiwan, fewer than 1% of day traders earned reliable profits after fees from one year to the next.
There is no salary for a day trader, so the honest answer to this question comes from studies that followed every trader in a market, not from the few who post their results. Two such studies exist, and this page reports their figures exactly as published.
How it works: how the studies measure income
Both studies use complete regulator or exchange records, not surveys. That matters, because a survey only hears from people who answer, and a screenshot only comes from people who won.
Brazil. Fernando Chague, Rodrigo De-Losso and Bruno Giovannetti used data from the CVM, Brazil’s securities regulator, covering every individual who day traded mini-Ibovespa index futures from 2012 to 2017. They studied the 19,646 people who began day trading between 2013 and 2015, and measured profit net of exchange and brokerage fees, but before income tax and before platform or course costs. They note that this overstates day trading profits.
Taiwan. Brad Barber, Yi-Tsung Lee, Yu-Jane Liu and Terrance Odean used complete transaction data from the Taiwan Stock Exchange for 1992 to 2006, published in the Journal of Financial Markets in 2014. They ranked day traders by their returns in one year and tracked how each group did the next, after commissions and Taiwan’s 0.3% tax on sales.
The two designs answer slightly different questions. Brazil asks how many persistent day traders earned a living wage. Taiwan asks how many earned profits that repeated, which separates skill from a lucky year.
A worked example: reading the Brazil figures
Start with everyone who began, then follow the people who kept going. This is the study’s own sequence, with the percentages recomputed:
- 19,646 people began day trading between 2013 and 2015.
- 1,551 of them day traded on more than 300 days: 1,551 ÷ 19,646 = 7.9%.
- Among those 1,551, 97% lost money after fees. The 47 who finished with a net profit are 47 ÷ 1,551 = 3.0%.
- 17 earned more than the Brazilian minimum wage, which the paper puts at US$16 a day: 17 ÷ 1,551 = 1.1%.
- 8 earned more than a bank teller’s starting salary, US$54 a day: 8 ÷ 1,551 = 0.5%. (These counts are from the June 2020 version; the paper’s current abstract gives this share as 0.4%.)
The daily wage figures come from annual ones. The paper gives the minimum wage as US$3,965.96 a year and a bank teller’s starting pay as US$13,648.86 a year. Spread over roughly 250 trading days, which is this page’s assumption for the check, that is about $15.86 and $54.60 a day, in line with the paper’s US$16 and US$54.
And the winners were not steady. The best of the 1,551 averaged US$310 a day, with a daily standard deviation of US$2,560. For the 8 who beat a bank teller, the standard deviation of daily profit ran from US$632 to US$3,308, so a typical day swung far more than the average day earned.
The study also looked for learning. Regressing each persistent trader’s daily profit on how many days they had traded, it found no evidence that performance improved with experience.
The original data
Across the 24,971 unique videos in the site’s finance search study, 7 titles ask this question about day traders, counted as titles containing “how much”, a form of “day trade” and one of “make”, “made” or “earn” (case-insensitive). They come from 4 channels and total 2,589,429 views.
One channel holds 92.3% of those views: two videos at 1,219,996 and 1,170,608 views, 2,390,604 in all. Four of the seven titles are first-person, asking or telling how much the creator makes.
Widen the match to any trader and the count is 16 titles from 13 channels, at a median of 30,790 views. The question draws a very large audience to a handful of creators, and the answers on offer are individual results. The two whole-market studies above are the population answer that sits behind them.
What the Taiwan study adds
Most Taiwanese day traders lost money, but some genuinely did not. In the average year about 450,000 individuals day traded, and about 277,000 traded more than NT$600,000 a year, roughly US$20,000. About 20% of those earned positive abnormal returns net of fees in a given year, a share the authors put at 17% to 20% depending on the definition.
Luck explains much of that 20%. Only about 4,000 traders, less than 1% of the day trader population, went on to earn reliably positive returns after costs the following year.
The best group was very good. The 500 top-ranked traders from the prior year earned 61.3 basis points a day before fees and 37.9 after, where a basis point is 0.01%. Traders with losses the year before went on to earn minus 11.5 before fees and minus 28.9 after.
Activity is not skill. The 500 most active day traders earned 14.4 basis points a day before costs and lost 7.4 after them. A 2017 working paper by the same team found that traders it classed as unprofitable produced 72% of day trading volume over the sample.
When it fails: reading the numbers wrongly
Mistaking the top for the typical. The Taiwan top 500 are real, and so is the fact that they are a tiny slice of hundreds of thousands. A plan built on their numbers is a plan built on the exception.
Ignoring the costs the studies left out. The Brazil figures exclude income tax, data, platforms and courses, so real outcomes were, if anything, worse than reported.
Treating an average as a wage. Even the Brazilian traders above the teller line had daily swings of hundreds or thousands of dollars. An income that arrives as a volatile average is not a salary, which is the point the full-time trading page makes with its own arithmetic.
Assuming experience fixes it. The Brazil data showed no learning among persistent traders, and the Taiwan work found many kept trading through long records of losses.
Assuming the results transfer. These are two markets and two periods. The Brazil authors suggest competition from high-frequency trading firms may explain why their top earners made less than Taiwan’s, which is a caution about applying either set to today’s US market.
Related
Day trading sets out what the style is and what it costs per trade, which is where these losses start. Full-time trading works through what happens when an account has to pay the bills. Trading capital covers how account size decides whether any of this is realistic. And the start trading guide puts the same base rate before any first trade.
Before asking how much day traders make, ask what the typical one makes, because that is the number a plan should start from. The published answer is below zero, and any strategy worth trying has to explain why it will not end up there.
— Michael Whitman
This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money.