I will give you what info that I can. Although there are many others who are far more expeienced with daytrading than I am. I have tried many different kinds of stock trading, including daytrading. Of them all, daytrading is my least favorite. It may not be the most work (but it ain't easy), but it's definitely the most stressful. In my experience there are far easier ways to make money in the stock market.

By law the minimum amount needed to open a daytrading account is $25,000. This will open a margin account, with which you can daytrade up to four times the amount that you have in your account. So with a minimum account of $25,000 you can daytrade up to $100,000 per day. (There are some restrictions) You must pay interest on any amount that you hold overnight that is in excess of the cash in your account. Daytraders never hold anything overnight.

There are many different styles of daytrading. You can trade gaps up, or gaps down. You can trade technicals or breakouts. You can trade a particular stock or group of stocks. Each style requires a specific set of tools and the skills to use them. At a minimum you will need a good broadband internet connection, streaming level 2 quotes, and a good broker. Quotetracker is a good, free platform that you can download and try, just to get a feel for what is involved. Also I believe that Scottrade will let you download and try their platform for free.

The broker that you choose depends upon your style of trading and the volume that you trade. Flat fee commission brokers like Scottrade are fine if you trade volumes above 1000 shares at a time. On a thirty dollar stock, that's $30,000 per trade. Personally I may buy more than 1000 shares, but I'll often take a position 100 shares at a time. So in my case paying $7 for each of those 100 share trades would kill me on commissions. Instead I use a broker that charges per share, not per trade. If you're not dealing in high volume it's best to pay per share, not per trade. That way you can buy 100 shares and it will only cost you $1 in commission.

The other thing that you should consider, just in case you do make money daytrading, is taxes. Although the advent of online tax services has made keeping track of all those daytrades considerably easier, it can still be a headache. It's much easier just to buy a stock, hold it all year, and then pay the taxes on it. Very simple.

I do not believe that daytrading is the best way to go for a beginner. It would be better to start by just buying and holding, or swingtrading. Personally I now use a service that sends me alerts on what to buy and sell. It actually works much better than I could ever do on my own, and it's a whole lot easier. Still it's quite common for me to lose $1000 or more per day. But on average my up days far outweigh my down days.

Yes, I do this for a living, and it is much easier than having a real job.

The State of Georgia pulled 100% of the brokerage account statements of its citizens to analyze that question. 90% of their daytraders lost 100% of their money, while 1% were profitable on a consistent basis.

The answer is yes you can make a good living doing it, but the average guy cannot do it. They may get lucky from time to time, but the average person is fighting the mathematics of the situation.

Let me describe an example. You decide to trade XYZ stock and it has a bid of 9.95 and an ask of 10.05. You buy at 10.05 giving .10 to the market maker. The next bid is 9.97 and 10.06. You still are not profitable. Then someone sells at 9.97 and the new bid is 9.94 and 10.03. You are now at a loss, and so forth. Overcoming just 10 cents is hard in a short time period. To make day trading profitable, because you are depending on small change, you have to borrow a lot. So instead of having 10.50 at risk you 105.00 at risk of which 10.50 is yours. So, over the next several minutes, the price rises because of a series of buys to 10.06 and 10.11. You try and sell out, but the bid is only for 100 shares. You sell the 100 shares and the price falls to 10.04 and 10.11. You made a 1 cent profit and you are still on the hook for the rest. The market maker, in the mean time, has made 1.05 in spread commissions plus any per unit commisions you may pay to your broker. You have made a penny, you are nearly $100 in debt and someone else got the dollar you were trying to make.

Now, lets imagine you picked well and it turns into a hot stock and six months later it is selling for 19.99 and 20.00. The maker is now only making a penny. Why?

That is the dirty trick. By the time you have made it to 20, you will probably have paid $20 in commisions, had a 10 increase in value and made another dollar or two in bonus money, you are up $12 on a ten dollar gain, if you were careful and did a very good job. The maker is really happy though because they are up $10 on their inventory, you gave them another $20.

However, lets get back to the why question, why is the spread only one cent.

When stocks go hot, they get overvalued and the market maker whose job is to hold inventory knows this and reduces inventory. Traders take up the inventory risk buy you carrying the inventory for the market. The risk is higher, but the market maker is carrying only a fraction of the inventory having sold it to day traders at a profit. So while you have $10 in profits held in an over valued stock, the maker actually is holding a lot of cash. They actually cashed out of the stock, down to a point they can still perform their function. They are basically now a notary, verifying who the buyers and sellers are. They are collecting a notary fee.

Now that the market has lost systematic support by the market maker, it depends upon you actually being online and willing to buy or sell as needed. This means supply will come available of either dollars or shares, only as people provide it. So the stock becomes very volatile. Whereas it may have only moved a penny per trade before, it may move six or seven cents per trade now,..maybe even ten cents. But that is less per dollar exposed than the market maker was pocketing in spreads, and the maker keeps the penny.

So the stock is at 19.99 and 20.00, one minute later it is at 20.06 and 20.07. You are actually exposed at 200.00 and so you pocket .70 on the trade. However, since you plow it back in again, it is sort of invisible.

Now for the nasty part. The stock climbs to 25 over the next few weeks and day traders are selling back and forth, mostly to each other. Someone gets nervous and leaves, taking their money to another stock, then someone else finds they cannot make money today, so they leave. When there was a market maker for the stock, that maker would absorb those sells, but now the maker is gone, unwilling to be anything other than a notary. These sells pressure the stock downward, putting other leveraged traders in a bind and it begins unwinding quickly, all the while the market maker is watching and collecting wider and wider notary spreads, but not stepping in to support the market. The market reaches 23.10 and 23.25. Now day traders have such a large spread to overcome they cannot do it, so they all try and leave. The price begins collapsing and some day traders try to buy into it figuring it will go up and they stabilize the price at $18.10 18.25. The price trades sidways for a few days and the spreads narrow, but the old day traders were burned and the ones who stepped in find themselves in a losing postion. Some exit taking their losses and some try to expand their position to gamble to make the money back. Again, the market maker is not providing much support because the volume has fell with all the day traders gone, so the inventory is about the same, but the maker will step in to stabilize the market at about a 7 cent spread. This is too much for the day traders that are left because the volume is now too low to make money quickly and another sell off occurs to fifteen. Now, the market maker is upping inventory as the stock becomes more valuable (a drop in price is an increase in future return as returns are inversely related to prices) and normalcy is beginning to occur or worse, short sellers are entering the market to force the stock to say, $5, and the maker needs inventory to support their shorting operations. These are hedge funds however, small traders need not apply and supply of shares to short will be unavailable to the little guy.

So, over that time period, an ordinary buy and hold investor is up $5. You, on the other hand, are down 80% because you borrowed money to day trade. Worse, you can only deduct $2000 in investment losses on your taxes, so you may owe taxes on prior period gains, but not be able to fully offset the losses, making you borrow money to pay the IRS, depending upon the tax timing.

I have been a professional investor for years. STAY AWAY!

If you have to ask these questions, you are not prepared to operate in these markets.

I strongly recommend buying "The Intelligent Investor," by Benjamin Graham. Last published in 1972, it is still in publication and will be in publication in2072. Be the guy who made the $5 the easy way, not the guy who fights for each penny.

Not well, at least for novices. Studies show over 70% of day traders lose money or at least underperform the market.

See for example this paper

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/275082.html

that shows day traders ("active traders") underperforming the market by -35%.

Or this one based on 135,000 daytraders in Taiwan that shows 80% of them losing:

http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/odean/papers/Day%20Traders/Day%20Trade%20040330.pdf

Here's a pretty good summary:

http://www.investorhome.com/daytrade/profits.htm

Try the stock trading simulator and great resources at

http://simulator.investopedia.com/home.aspx

About.com: 'Becoming a Day Trader'

http://daytrading.about.com/cs/education…

About.com: 'Day Trading'

http://daytrading.about.com/#b

AskMen.com: 'How To Become A Day Trader'

http://www.askmen.com/money/investing_10…

Day Trading World:

http://www.daytradingworld.com/…

Daytrader's Bulletin:

http://www.daytradersbulletin.com/…

If you are serious about daytrading, you don't want to be daytrading lower-priced securities.

Most successful daytraders (with emphasis on successful) trade small movements in highly liquid, higher-priced stocks (and/or derivatives of those securities or the indices).

Good luck.

Daytrading is buying and selling stocks shortly after purchasing them.

It is very risky, and any gains are taxed at a higher tax rate, the short term capital gains rate.

It is supposed to work like this, buy a stock, wait for it to go up, and then sell within a month or so, reap the profit, and it is so much you don't care about the higher tax rates.

More often, it is buy a stock, panic when it drops, sell it and lose money.

80% of all daytraders lose money.

Be CAREFUL.

Well, it IS possible to do well daytrading stocks–I'm proof of that–but it's true that the majority of daytraders fail. You need to have a good brain, learn as much as you possibly can, develop a good strategy, and have the discipline to carry out that strategy. Without all of these things, you're doomed to fail.

Trading PENNY STOCKS will just increase your chances of failure and is akin to gambling: You may hit it big once in a while, but usually you'll lose.

As suggested, start with a 'Dummies' book or the like. Also, scour the internet for info on daytrading. Investopedia.com, for one, has some good articles on short-term trading and technical analysis.

The decimal system improved it, as the spreads suddenly became much smaller.

What killed a lot of daytraders was the internetstock boom and bust in 2001.

I trade stocks full time but I am not a daytrader. I don't think you can plunge into daytrading – unless you want to run your account into the ground. Daytrading is a very specialized skill that takes a long time to develop. Most daytraders lose money and wash out.

Also, the surest way to pile up losses is to expect your trading to pay the bills.

I'm confused. She wants a company that trains, yet "she has many years of daytrading experience"? Which is it?

Companies hiring trainees, in my experience, generally want people straight out of school, preferable with athletic credentials. They feel this means that the trainee has physical stamina and is competitive.

Experience means working on the proprietary trading desk of a firm, not sitting at home with a personal account. That's a way to develop bad habits. It's a different word when you're dealing with size.

Besides, if she's making money in her own account, why would she want to work for somebody else? So, I'm assuming she's not making money. So, why would a firm want to hire her.

By the way, "churn and burn" is a term that applies to retail stock sales people, not traders.