I think you can certainly seize on special situations and what not in certain cases, but to make a go of it trading on a small account is probably a disaster waiting to happen.
This kid should go trade at a prop shop or something if he’s got limitless time. He can see the glamour of scalping a few bips a trade.
There really aren’t any fast or easy ways to make money in this world. The OP wants to take big risk and says he has the big assets to do it, but without experience this could be setting up for a huge fall.
“Question: How can I end up with $10 million dollars trading the market? Answer: Start with $20 million.”
That said, trading your own money is a useful learning experience. Just make sure that you can survive if you lose it. Trading in order to make rent is a stress that ages you rapidly and clouds your judgement.
O.P., When I was young I took about $10,000 to day trading at work (I thought this was a fortune). Make a long story short, all it took was one bad trade and my $10k had decreased to $4k (I was using margin on my trades). I cheerish the lessons I learned from that experience; which informs my prinicples for investing (also, doing my taxes the next year was a nightmare; I had done hundreds of trades and this was before brokers would send you the tax form with a list of sales)
That being said; I wouldn’t recommend for anyone to trade, investing with a long term horizon is the way to go; IMO. But if you are going to trade, here are a few ideas (these are my opinions and not prefessional recommendations as I am NOT a day-trader)
Lesson#1: Only trade money that if you were to lose all of it, it wouldn’t mean anything.
Lesson#2: The real money is in trading options and options strategies
Lesson#3: Trading on Margin will put your positions on steroids and if you crash it’ll be a hard one (but options, last time I checked, can not be purchased on Margin)
Lesson#4: If you’re going to day-trade equities, close out your positions at the end of each day
Before you start anything, you need to have realistic expectations. You will never get wealthy trading or investing in the market. You can do very well for yourself, but wealthy people don’t make money in the secondary market.
The wealthiest among us make their money at IPOs when they convince others to take a stake at a cost of 20, 50, 100 times earnings. Your road to richdom is having a stake before it reaches the stock market.
Well IPO’s are risky, because there is no track record of the stock.
What you describe “having a stake before it reaches the stock market” can also be achieved through block trades.i.e. you buy a block of stocks OTC @ a discount to the market price. The discount is usually pretty small, but still, you can arbitrage a small profit by selling it simultaneously to the open market.
Obviously you need a significant trading account so that brokers/sales people call you for that, or enough connections so that the sellers tell you about their blocks of stocks they wish to sell without going through the market.