Anyone remember the old days of day trading?

Full-time trader here.

I’m sure many of you have seen me comment in this subreddit a lot, and I always start my comments off the same. But it’s time for me to ask a question as I want to see the demographic in here.

I’m 34. I’ve been trading for 13 years, and it took me until 2 years ago to turn a profit. Seems like when I mention that people balk. To me it shows how young a lot of folks are and when they started trading. Why? Because not only did I suck as a trader, but when I started trading in 2012 things were WAY different!

Back then there were zero prop firms around. There weren’t even micro contracts yet in futures. None of this “get an account for $40 and pass an evaluation and pay a $149 activation fee!” You had to have serious capital to trade.

TD Ameritrade had ThinkorSwim and the margin to trade ONE /ES contract was over $6,000. That’s just to even say you wanted to trade it. You had to have even more in buffer just to be safe. I think it was TD Ameritrade or Schwab that had a minimum requirement of $25k of cash in an account to even trade mini futures contracts. I finally found a broker that allowed me to open an account with $2,000 and they just lowered the /ES contract to $1,000 and I thought I had died and gone to heaven. It was for “traders who are underfunded.”

Day trading wasn’t a common thing at all. People weren’t even talking about bitcoin. It was an extremely niche thing, and only for people with deep pockets. I remember reading on forums where people griped about micros because people would flood the futures markets, people’s strategies would stop working because too many people getting in on the trades, etc. all kinds of crap.

No Robinhood, no acorn, no Apex or TopStep, no YouTube influences or Instagram influencers showing you trades, no discords, no mobile apps to trade off of unless it was CQG, there hardly was ever a trading video on YouTube it seemed like. And no one talking about it either unless you were already doing it.

I recall a trading friend meeting someone in a chat room (remember those?) and he paid $5k for this guy’s strategy. Yes. Five freaking grand. For a strategy. When typed out it could fit on a single word document page. If he wanted to trade with him online in a private setting? $1k a month. Too rich for my blood. He could only afford the strategy, and he couldn’t figure it out even after it was explained to him so $5k went down the drain. The other guy? Shortly after that he said he was retiring and went offline. Common back in those days.

To say it was overwhelming times to learn is an understatement. Back then I felt like that kid in George Carlin’s bit about education; “you don’t have a pencil? Ah, you’ll be fine kid get the fuck in there it’s physics.”

Anyone else’s trading journey date back that far? And does anyone else remember when it was for people with deeper pockets, and hardly any educational tools to learn from?

Good luck to all you younger traders out there! It’s easier now than it’s ever been to hop in the markets.