Day Trading versus Internet Marketing

Yes I have to agree with this as I did Trading Full time for a number of years. I find IM a much more satisfying endeavour. You do get great Highs with Day Trading but when you have those off days be prepared for sleepless nights.

IM is much more even tempo and like you said you can earn in your sleep whereas you cant with Day trading !!

Although a Day trader will wholeheartidly disagree, I would say IM adds more value to Society than Day trading. In Day trading you get so wrapped up in the Money because honestly thats what it is all about. But in IM you have the Opportunity to make money and help people solve their problems at the same time!!

My cousin-in-law day trades 1-2 hours a day and makes over a million a year. I am betting he is the exception, not the rule. Day Trading seems risky to me though I know a lot that do it a couple hours a day only and make 2-500 dollars in that time. Some people are just not cut out for it. Especially anyone with impulsive tendencies. (which leaves me out) Lol. If he is doing well, IM could be a second income stream, but no need to stop what is working for him?

Simple, day trading is a gamble at best, and internet marketing (when done properly) is a business. Inherently, a well run business will beat out any form of gambling any day. Factor in the aforementioned passive income, and thats the very reason that i switched from day trading to internet marketing myself

I believe that both day trading and internet marketing are the same in many ways. Here's why.

I'm sure your dad is most likely not an "all or nothing" trader, that he manages his risk by only putting up a percentage of his total stake in order to ensure that if he's wrong about the market he can stay in the game long enough to get to the winner he would ultimately let ride. (Many professional day traders start with strict money management, such as "never risk more than 5% of total trading capital, etc. Some are even stricter, never going over 2% of trading capital in any one trade.)

The problem with a lot of internet marketers (especially when first starting out) is, they don't think like that. The marketers who do (especially when using Adwords) have the staying power in many times and are still around to launch another Adwords campaign.

Your dad probably also doubles- or triples-up (or even more) once he's certain he has a winning trade. Bigtime marketers do that, too. They test first, and then when the test shows they have a winner, they scale up and reinvest the profits to get bigger profits. Willie Crawford once said that for every dollar he spends, he gets $7 back. That means he has tested in order to find this out and plows every dollar from his winning marketing campaign back into advertising to bring a bigger profit...those $7 for each dollar he spends.

Another problem with a lot of internet marketers I see is, they don't treat it like a true business. In other words, they start out with a little spare change and hope for the best, trying to move the world with their sales letter on a very tight budget selling a $27 product. Which is very hard to do. Yet any time you think of starting any other kind of business, especially in the brick and mortar world, no one would dare even THINK of opening their doors for business with less than 2 months expenses and in many cases not even 1 years' worth of expenses in the bank!

That's just like the guy who can barely get an account open taking a look at some charts and seeking out the trade he thinks will be most likely to succeed and then betting his entire account on that one trade . . . an account that (s)he just opened and only has enough money in it to purchase a single way-out-of-the-money option on something that is more like a casino bet than a trade, something that has the option price so low because the likelihood of a market turning that purchase into a successful trade is next to nothing.

Hey! I've been there. Bought cocoa options that I should have left alone that were trading @ 12, frustrated that they went down after I bought and closed at 9 points. Lucky me! The next day they opened @ 25 and it was profits from then out. And yeah, I bet the farm! (Too bad it wasn't a very big farm!) At the time I had NO IDEA why that trade worked. Which meant I shouldn't have been in that market at that time. I later learned the why and how to do it again. (By the way, that happened to be a once-a-year event. Some internet markets are like that, too . . . seasonal. Buck the seasonal trade and lose your shirt!)

Which brings me to another similarity between internet marketing and day trading.

Knowing how you went wrong when you lose is just as important as knowing what happened when things went right. That means you will not only NOT make the mistake twice, but also that you will be able to see what the correct action would have been so that next time the same scenario pops up you can get it right.

Undercapitalized makes it harder to succeed (but not impossible) in both markets. Having the right minimum capital makes life easier in both net marketing and day trading. And relieves some of the stress as well. I learned during my trading days that I managed money "funny" compared to most people. Once I learned that and got comfortable with going against conventional money management suggestions, pulling the trigger became easier and I also saw more opportunities to take trades. For some people writing a sales letter is the same way; they have to get used to good vs. bad sales letters and the things good letters have in common vs. what bad letters all have in common. Knowing the "why" makes it less stressful when you take action in either market.

And believe it or not, there are things that are beyond your control and unpredictable about both day trading and internet marketing. You never know when the server is going to crash or someone is going to hack your site and shut you down, just like you never know when a major unplanned event in the world is going to have an effect on your trade. (For instance, when an enemy of the US is going to do something stupid that makes the powers that be shut down the markets in reaction to it...remember September 11? The train attacks in England? The Mumbai hunt for people with American or British passports?)

Day trading can be a "make a decision, place an order, and then walk away" decision depending on the market. Order-cancels-order is one of my favorite ways to trade. But it's not always an option, not available in every market or for every opportunity.

I think you'll find that most internet marketers lose money, too.

A lot less of it, but still.

One disadvantage with day trading I can see is that you suffer from variance - i.e. no matter how good you are you WILL without a shadow of a doubt have a series of days or week where you will lose money. And you need to have suitable cash to survive on when this happens.

In this respect day trading is similar to PPC, but very different from other IM methods based on creating value and promoting for free or next to nothing.