Have I ever been unable to fulfill an order because of the size? No. I've played around with 20 to 40K.
I am biased because I think day trading is foolish (unless you have a lot of money to spare). I have earned a considerable amount of money investing in Tesla Motors and other small companies, but it took some time to see a sizable return. I am mostly against day trading because arbitragers purposely tamper with the market to short and pump stocks (my company is guilty of doing it too), so it is so hard to predict the market from day-to-day, unlike quarterly periods where you can rely on economic data. I would be more conservative and only use a small portion of your money to day trade with. I find it is difficult to short stocks unless you start in December of the previous (revenues for most US companies decrease in the first quarter of the year because a new budget is in place). Use maybe $10,000 to day trade with, conserving $3,000 for a contra account to short with.
If your broker doesn't have the shares, or has already shorted the stock - then they won't have the shares for YOU to short.
I practised day trading for three years until I finally put some money in.
I initially put 2300 and increased my portfolio to 2700 by the end of the month. I only put 2300 in just so I could get a feel for how my reactions would change when I switched from fake to real money.
I now want to put in 17,300$ more so I can increase my portfolio to 20k. Most of the money I made came from shorting stocks. Often when I tried to short stocks (for 2300$) however I would sometimes get a message from my broker saying there is not enough shares to short.
So my question is......
1: With 20k, would that be too much to day trade with? Would there be enough shares to for me to short or go long when spending 20k?
2:Have any of you ran into trouble purchasing stocks/shorting stocks and have been unable to do so because your order is too big?
