Is it possible?

my friend has 15k in his account and trades around 20x a wk.

[Sniper]

Some brokers will allow you to day trade on a "cash available" basis under 25K, but not all of them.

The actual rule...
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a. Minimum Equity Requirement for Pattern Day Traders - The minimum equity required for the accounts of customers deemed to be pattern day traders shall be $25,000. This minimum equity must be deposited in the account before such customer may continue day trading and must be maintained in the customer's account at all times.

[/ QUOTE ]

[coolhandsun]

You might want to think about the logic behind this strategy for trading stocks. I've never been a fan of aggressive short term trading in general. You're counting on finding inefficiencies and "beating Wall St"...which is pretty tough. I'm in the industry and still don't think I could turn much profit taking short term stock positins....you have to have an edge.

Also, the idea of keeping your losers and cutting your winners is a bad way to go about stock trading in general. There was a recent nobel prize winner in economics who won for his work in behavioral finance. I think it was Kahneman. One of his observations was people tend to make assymetric decisions based on the bias in how they frame the decision. Whether the positions been profitable is not necessary to frame the decision and can cause inefficient decisions.

If you think GOOG is a good stock to be long at 300, then you should be long it. If you're already long it you shouldn't sell. You're essentially trying to find price inefficiencies in the stock, so your position should be a function of the opinion over its value (or where you think you can get out of it), your capital, and your risk thresholds. However, if you bought it for 290, your model would have you lock in the profit and sell it at 300 and sell out your position. And if you had shorted it at 310, and it goes to 300, your model has you holding your short position. In both cases you should be long GOOG at 300, despite your profits or losses in that stock. But both ways that Google can go to 300 has you either remaining short, or selling out your long.

Your proposed trading style mirrors one of the psychological paradoxes/weaknesses of how people make inefficient decisions. Whether it has been a profitable decision in the last 5 days shouldn't have an effect on your trading activity. The exception being that your opinion of the edge in holding the position may have changed since you put the position on, for perhaps the same reason the positions performed poorly.

Some background stuff on the psychology of trading and framing decisions if you're interested:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_finance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_%28economics%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_in_the_bush

Gavin

p.s. Not suggesting you don't try a little trading with "mad money"...not my game. Just a suggestion to re-frame your trading decisions. "The ultimate risk is not taking a risk"

yes also another way around it is if you have an overseas broker, only thing is commissions are a bit higher like 20 a trade.