| The popularity of day trading has soared since the outbreak of the pandemic. We haven't seen an interest in day trading comparable to this since the dot-com boom. It is common knowledge how that ended... It wasn't good. Millennials, who weren't around for the last day trading boom and bust, are leading the resurgence. They have jumped onto low-cost trading platforms like Robinhood (without any training or professional guidance) and are incredibly active in the market. They are driving trading volumes to all-time highs. For January 2021, the average daily trading volume of equities was up almost 35% from January 2020 and up more than 100% from January 2019. I wish this new generation of day traders luck in growing their wealth, but I am not optimistic about their chances of success. The historical data tied to day trading is overwhelming against them. Study after study shows that over any meaningful period of time, nonprofessional day traders perform incredibly poorly. Perhaps the largest study done was on Taiwanese day traders in 2011. That study covered the 15-year period from 1992 through 2006. Of the 360,000 Taiwanese day traders who were typically active each year, fewer than 1% were able to earn positive abnormal returns net of fees. Fewer than 1%... I don't like those odds. Another Taiwanese study looked at 130,000 day traders active from 1995 to 1999. That study found that in a typical six-month period, 82% of those day traders lost money. And they were losing money during a bull market! In 2019, a study of 1,600 day traders in Brazil was published. Different country, same results... Over the one-year period that these day traders were tracked, the study found that only 3% of them actually made money. Only 1.1% earned more than the Brazilian minimum wage. And, of course, 97% of them were out of pocket for their year of day trading efforts. | 
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