Switching Career Paths Again: Why I'm Becoming a Day Trader - From Failure to Seeing the Light
Imagine this.
You work from home as a developer or somewhere in tech. You are sitting at home in your computer chair and have a few minutes before you have to attend another pointless work Zoom meeting.
You pause your work to join the meeting, even though you just want to keep on working, and wait in silence for the host to start.
You put on your headphones and turn on your camera (well… sometimes). You sit there thinking… is this what I worked so hard for? 40 hours a week of this, making mediocre money (when you’re not US-based) and nowhere near well off.
Then you think back to earlier in the day. When you took a peek through your social media feed on your phone and can’t STOP thinking about this one particular post you saw.
You can’t get it out of your head. It was another one of those traders showing off the profits from their latest trade.
This time… they made your entire monthly salary in a single trade and only worked for 1-2 hours. Completely free with their time and schedule for the rest of the day. You swallow deeply.
Gosh… WTF am I doing wrong?!?! Is this really possible? Do people make that much money?
Years ago… that was more or less me. Except I was still learning how to code and trying to break into tech when I first discovered someone repetitively making thousands of dollars from a single trade. And that journey into tech was not an easy one at all.
Eventually I succeeded and landed my first developer job. I knew from this experience that I could switch careers if I wanted.
Later on when I was working from home as a developer and dealing with all these zoom meetings, I had a sense of not being fully happy in tech.
Don’t get me wrong… there were a lot of great perks, benefits, and advantages, but I felt I was still underperforming based on my abilities.
I started to go deeper into learning about how to become a trader, day trading and trading strategies. I came across numerous traders making thousands of dollars or tens of thousands of dollars.
My brain got completely rewired of what is possible in terms of making money. My mind was blown. I didn’t fully recognize this at the time, but it was really the start of another career pivot.
This time, the destination became day trading.
This post is about why I chose this path, what I’ve actually faced along the way, and why after 5 years of trading I’m more committed than ever.
Why Day Trading?
The Appeal of Uncapped Earnings
Picture this. It’s the end of the year. You’ve worked your butt off, improved the product, stayed late and contributed to the company’s growth and record-breaking revenue. You wonder what you’ll get as a Christmas bonus?
And your reward is… nothing! Or some lame gift card.
You think to yourself…
How. Lovely.
The new year rolls around and now comes the part you’ve been dreading.
You walk into your manager’s office. Or worse, you schedule a Zoom call.
Excuse me, but I believe I’ve been working hard all year and deserve a salary increase. Here are my reasons…
You lay out your case. All the projects. The late nights. The value you brought. Then you wait.
Weeks pass. Sometimes months.
Finally, the response comes back. A counter-offer. Maybe 10%. Probably less. Take it or leave it.
You worked your heart out and this is what they offer? It’s demoralizing.
You contribute to the company’s success, but the financial reward back to you is minimal. And you know deep down that you’re replaceable. The company will survive without you as you’re not as valuable as you think. Ask for too much salary and they’ll replace you with someone cheaper.
That’s the salary negotiation game. You’re always asking permission. Always waiting. Always limited. And never in a position of power.
With trading? Want a raise? Give it to yourself.
- Increase your position size.
- Eliminate your worst mistakes.
- Maximize your best trades.
- Improve your strategy.
You’re in full control. No begging. No waiting. No lowball offers. No earnings cap.
And it’s crazy to think… there are many traders out there who make my entire monthly developer salary in one trade. Or heck… my yearly salary in one month, week or even day. When that reality hits you, something shifts inside.
You start questioning everything.
There has got to be a better way…
The Entrepreneurial Middle Ground
I caught the entrepreneurial itch many, many years ago. I’ve done Techstars Startup Weekend, tried indie hacker challenges, hackathons and had multiple failed startups. Since I started, I have always desired to build my own thing.
But here’s my problem. My biggest weaknesses are sales and marketing. And without sales, you can’t run a business. So I’m already at a disadvantage.
Add in the fact that I’m not a natural networker. I’m quiet and not the kind of person who climbs the corporate ladder by earning brownie points. That’s just not me, nor my style.
Trading eliminates both of those weaknesses completely.
No customers to deal with. No marketing campaigns to run. No sales calls to make. No clients to manage. You just… buy or sell. Press a button and the broker handles the exchange. Done.
It’s somewhere in between a one-person business with clients and a 9-to-5 salary job. It’s a soft transition in the business direction. And honestly… it suits my personality, strengths, and desires perfectly.
A Seed Planted A Long Time Ago
About 10 or so years ago, I heard a concept from some online business guru. Probably in a blog post or from an email newsletter. I can’t remember exactly. It was about the “4 pillars of wealth.”
I don’t remember all of them, but I do remember the first two:
- Income/Savings - A way to make money (a growth engine)
- Investments - A way for your money to make more money
That second pillar really stuck with me. The idea of having your money work for you while you sleep (aka passive income). Making money from money.
I became really drawn to stocks and trading as my future investment vehicle. More so than real estate. More than crypto. More than private investments or Airbnb rentals. It was just what resonated with me.
That seed was planted. It took years to fully grow, but it never left my mind.
Why Not Just Stay a Programmer?
Programming brought many good things into my life. Laptop lifestyle. Work from anywhere in the world. Some flexibility in my work schedule.
It was a step up from civil engineering, for sure.
But it wasn’t all rosy.
Since I wasn’t a US-based developer (I was working in Europe) my salary was very average. In fact it was less than when I was a civil engineer. My upside salary ceiling was probably 5-10x lower than if I were in America, yet I was doing more or less the same work. I also had no equity in the company.
Deep down inside, this ate away at me.
Then I also wasn’t satisfied with the job itself. Being stuck fixing bugs. Only doing pure programming. Pointless meetings and working on boring tasks that didn’t interest me. Not having a say in company decisions or product direction. No influence or power to change things. It sucked and demotivated me.
Why?
I truly enjoy product development, design, entrepreneurship and business thinking. But as a full-time developer, you rarely get to do that.
I was craving something more. Board of directors. Founder or co-founder. Director. Being on a new product, research and development team. Something that allowed me to be a developer, but also tap into my business/entrepreneurial skills.
However, it’s not easy to get into higher, more powerful positions or come across such opportunities when you’re quiet and not a natural networker. Yeah, I could change jobs and maybe I’d find something that fulfills me more in the tech world.
But… things were starting to rapidly change in tech.
AI had clearly arrived and suddenly AI replacing developer jobs became a possibility. And I don’t mean in some very distant future way. AGI will be here sooner than most people think.
The bar for who can build software has been lowered. Everyone can be a developer now with vibe coding (having AI assistants write all the code for them). What happens when the thing you trained years for can be done by anyone with ChatGPT?
I’d rather pivot early than wait to be replaced. The job market in tech has been pretty rough the last couple years and it seems the golden years of a career in tech are behind us.
This can mean pursuing a different career that’s protected from AI, staying the course and becoming a 10x developer, pivoting within the field itself or starting your own niche business. Either way, I don’t want to be naive about AI. Programming as we know it will completely change.
Now, day trading also has its issues. First, it has much higher risks. You can and will lose money at times. But you also have more control, more flexibility, and more potential reward.
The lure of that sucked me in.
The Struggles People Gloss Over
Let me be totally honest about what this journey has actually been like. Because the Instagram/TikTok/YouTube/Twitter algorithms won’t show you this part of trading.
They’ll push what drives more views and likes. Which tends to only be big wins, big payouts, successes and showing you numbers that make you question reality.
Psychological Warfare
The mental side of trading is what breaks most people. It’s not the strategies. It’s not the charts. It’s what happens inside your head.
Big losses. Losing streaks. Putting months of time and energy into learning and practicing, only to get wrecked by a string of trades. Repeatedly.
You know you shouldn’t remove your stop loss. Keep holding that losing trade. You know you should just cut it. But you don’t.
You’re stubborn. You refuse to be wrong as it will hurt your ego.
Instead, you watch a small loss turn into a massive one. You’ve done this before. You swore you wouldn’t do it again. And yet here you are doing it again and again.
Then there’s the unlearning if you started with the wrong concepts and strategies. Strategies that didn’t fit or work for you.
In my case this happened when I finally discovered ICT (Inner Circle Trader) concepts a couple years into my journey. I had to unlearn everything.
Including all of my habits that I built up over the years. Totally useless! Harmful to my success. It felt like starting over from scratch, except with a lot of baggage.
And here’s the thing that took me way too long to understand: trying to be right is not the same as being on the right side of the market.
The market is always right. Period.
It doesn’t care about your analysis. It doesn’t care about your bias. It will not do what you want it to. I had to learn that the hard way. Many, many times.
The Social Media Curse
Scroll through trading X (Twitter), Instagram or TikTok. What do you see?
Wins. Huge wins. Screenshots of massive profits. Lambos. Lifestyle.
How “Trading is so easy once you get it.”
When you’re in the learning phase and struggling, this takes a toll on you. You compare yourself to these highlight reels. You wonder what’s wrong with you when you have a red day. Why can’t you figure it out when everyone else seems to have it dialed in?
Here’s what they don’t show you.
Many of these “traders” are influencers. They make a good to significant chunk of their money from affiliate links, paid courses, and Discord subscriptions. Not from actual trading. They’re selling the dream, not living it.
The space is filled with scammers. It’s easy to be misled with fake screenshots or hindsight analysis. And the constant comparison to others’ supposed success makes your own journey feel like constant failure.
It’s also easy to be swayed when you’re new.
Trading influencers also share their bias. Their levels. Their predictions. Yet they can be wrong. But you will get swayed by their opinion.
You start second-guessing your own plan and analysis because some guy with 50K followers said the opposite. You lose your independence as a trader.
It’s a trap. And I fell into it many times.
The Real Truth
Here’s the stuff I actually have struggled with on this journey towards becoming a day trader:
Overtrading. Feeling like I needed to be in a trade, every… single… day. That addiction to pressing buttons, being in the action. Plus being impatient instead of waiting for setups.
FOMO / Chasing. Anticipating and seeing a move happen without me. Then getting impatient, jumping in late, hoping to catch the tail end. Only to enter at the top/bottom and get wrecked.
Revenge trading. Taking a loss and immediately trying to make it back. Trading angry. Trading emotional. Only piling up the losses instead.
Letting one bad trade infect the next. Carrying the mental baggage of your last loss into your next trade. Not being able to mentally reset. Eventually, I created my own pre-trading emotional checklist web app to help me with this.
Trading on emotions. I feel. My gut says. Versus having a systematic approach with a defined model. Too many “I think I see something” and clicking buy/sell.
Forgetting the bigger picture. Getting lost in the noise by spending too much time on lower timeframes. Forgetting about the actual direction on higher timeframes.
Going for too much. Going for a home run instead of a base hit. Asking for too much when the market isn’t going anywhere.
Tunnel vision. Being married to a bias and refusing to adapt. Especially when I was completely wrong. Refusing to see what the market was telling me.
Skipping steps. Moving right into live trading instead of demo trading or backtesting because I already had experience. Instead of properly developing and backtesting my own trading model. This only set me back years.
My Lowest Point in Trading
I’ll never forget it.
Three trading days. All red. That’s all it took.
I had been doing months of solid work. Built up a nice year-to-date profit. Things were looking good. Nearly three profitable months behind me. I was about to close another green month.
Then came the last day of the month. I saw a setup, or I thought I did. Really, I was chasing. I wanted a bigger monthly return. One more trade to pad the stats.
Price immediately went against me. I was waiting for a bounce.
It never came.
The day turned from bad to worse. Instead of cutting the loss early and walking away, I did what I always did. I held.
Finally I took a big loss. Month turned red.
I rush into another trade. Wrong again. I didn’t want to take another loss. The trade turns into a swing trade based on hope.
I came back the next day. I’m even deeper in the red. The bleeding doesn’t stop. My account keeps going down and after weeks, my position is finally closed. Margin called.
Still very emotional and not thinking clearly. I rush to get on the right side of the market. Instead, the market changes direction and I take another loss.
Next 2 days after that? Same thing. Three red days in a row. Months of progress, heavily destroyed.
I finally summon the strength to stop and prevent my account from further damage.
And this wasn’t a one-time thing. It happened several times in a 1-2 year period. Build up profits over months, then give it all back (and then some) in a matter of days. You finish the month up, feeling good, and then one bad decision cascades into a red week, a red month, a red year.
When that happens enough times, you reach a breaking point. Either change your bad habits, take this seriously, or quit. Because it isn’t magically going to stop.
I had to take several breaks from trading during such periods. Stepping away because I was so dejected. So angry at myself. Repeating the same mistakes over and over. Watching things not work no matter how hard I tried.
But that burning desire to figure it out always came back. Soon I’d be back in demo or live trading, telling myself this time it’ll be different.
Of course it wasn’t. Not for a long time.
Until eventually, after one too many times, I actually wanted to change. Not just say I wanted to. Actually wanted it. And finally, I did.
What Changed
This year has been different. Not because of some magical “aha moment.” It was a gradual accumulation of finally learning from pain.
Reducing the Massive Losses
I finally started cutting losses earlier. Taking small hits. Living to trade another day.
When I’m tempted to hold a loser and hope for a miracle, I remember the low points. The huge losses. The red months that should have been green. The feeling of watching months of work disappear.
I thought to myself that it is better to take the loss now, when it’s relatively small, than to destroy months of progress hoping for a turnaround that almost never works out.
I know not to do it. I’ve always known. But knowing and doing are different things. And after experiencing that pain enough times, the memory of those low points makes me act.
It’s almost always better to just take the small loss now, mentally reset and live to trade another day.
Not Forcing Trades
I don’t need to trade every day anymore. That mentality was killing me before.
Part of what helped was having a passion project that actually serves my trading goals. Something to focus on besides staring at charts and taking impulsive trades.
For me, this distraction is building BacktestingLab. It is a strategy development and backtesting software that I’m building.
Less time on the charts means less chance of making stupid decisions. Less overtrading. Less forcing. Less chasing.
Adapting My Bias
I’m more willing to be wrong now. Not married to a direction. If the market tells me I’m wrong, I accept it earlier instead of stubbornly holding and hoping.
This sounds simple but it took years to actually do. The ego wants to be right. Admitting you’re wrong feels like failure.
But in trading, being wrong quickly is so much better than being wrong slowly.
The Result
This year, I only had one major slip up. A very red month. But I was able to bounce back from it and am finishing with my first green YTD.
Yay!
Not from some magic formula, but from (almost) eliminating my worst habits.
The big losses that used to define my years? Reduced to one. Not gone completely. But way less frequent and less damaging overall.
There’s still work to do. But the trajectory is finally right. And that’s encouraging. It shows me that change is possible. That I can actually do this.
Doubling Down: How I’m Getting to the Next Level
One thing that held me back for years was I didn’t really have the option to properly backtest any ICT strategies the way that I wanted to.
So I had skipped the process that successful traders preach. Education, backtesting, forward testing, demo trading, then live trading.
I went straight to live trading because I thought I could learn on the fly. Because I already had “experience.”
That arrogance cost me years and a bunch of money.
As I mentioned earlier, I’m now building the tool I wish existed when I first came across ICT.
BacktestingLab will be a desktop application for automated and manual backtesting plus strategy development. It fits well with my engineering and programming background and trading passion.
I’m building it exactly how I want.
When it’s done, I know it’ll take my trading to the next level. Proper backtesting. Statistical confidence. A defined trading model instead of having to rely on gut feelings and hope.
It’s also my way to give back to the trading community. The tool I wish was available when I first started learning ICT. And it’s proof, to myself and anyone reading, that I’m taking trading very seriously.
This isn’t a hobby anymore. It’s my career path.
For Anyone Considering This Path
Don’t let me sugarcoat it. Trading is very hard. The majority of people who try trading will fail or not stick around long enough to find success.
And simply working hard doesn’t guarantee success either in this industry. You need to be working on the right things.
Losses and drawdowns are part of the game. Being truly okay with that by not panicking, not changing everything after a bad week, and not revenge trading is the hardest part. It’s a mental game more than anything else.
However, if you don’t take risks and live a safe, comfortable life… that’s exactly the kind of life you’ll have.
I want more than that.
I want to be well off financially while I’m still young. Not waiting until I’m 60 or 70 because there are no guarantees later on in life.
And if it doesn’t work out? I’ll figure it out. I have options to fall back on. So it’s a calculated, but still a bit risky move.
But If You Crack It…
The sky is truly the limit.
Complete time and schedule freedom. No salary cap. No annoying Zoom meetings. No having to ask for permission.
A total lifestyle upgrade.
Just you in full control over your financial future.
I know I’m more than capable as I already succeeded in switching careers once, going from civil engineering to programming. I’m in the process of doing it again.
The burning desire hasn’t died. It’s stronger than ever. All those failures, all those low points, all those times I wanted to quit… yet I’m still going. Still learning. Still improving.
This time, I’m seeing the light.
If you want to follow my journey or get updates on BacktestingLab, you can find me on X @davidpnowak.