Buy and sell stocks, options or futures within the same day, with your own money. Most people who try lose it.
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Pay, the path, pros and cons and the facts on one printable page. Good for a wall or a guidance counsellor.
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What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Typical
$0
Most people
$0
Top 1 in 100
$60,000
There is no wage and no Job Bank figure. Your income is what your account makes after fees and tax, and for most people that is a loss. The typical result is shown as $0 because a loss cannot be pay. The top figure is a rough guide to what the rare steady earner makes; nobody publishes the full spread.
97 out of 100
Brazilian futures day traders who kept going for more than 300 days
A 2020 study followed every person who started day trading Brazil's main futures contract from 2013 to 2015. Of those who stuck with it, 97% lost money. Only 1.1% earned more than the minimum wage.
Fewer than 1 in 100
Taiwan day traders who were reliably profitable after fees
Researchers studied every trade on the Taiwan stock market from 1992 to 2006. Fewer than 1% of day traders could predictably beat the market after costs, and more than 75% quit within two years.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
The low end is a brokerage account with free practice trading and free education from regulators. The high end is a paid course, a year of charting software and market data, and a trading group subscription, many of them billed in US dollars. Neither figure includes the money you trade with. Most beginners lose a large share of it, and that loss is usually far bigger than anything on this list.
Only trade money you can afford to lose completely. Never borrow, use a credit card or touch rent money to trade.
Trading for yourself is self-employment with no employer behind you.
No workplace pension or RRSP (Registered Retirement Savings Plan) match
You fund your own retirement.
No dental or drug plan
Provincial health care covers doctors and hospitals, not the rest.
No EI (Employment Insurance)
Trading losses do not count as a job loss.
No steady paycheque
Losing months are normal even for good traders, so you need savings to cover them.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
There is no diploma or licence. The people who last treat it like a slow apprenticeship, with a job paying the bills.
Learn how markets work
2 to 3 months
Orders, spreads, margin, options and tax, from free broker and regulator material before any paid course.
Practise with fake money
3 to 6 months
Use a practice account and write down every trade and why you made it.
Trade very small with real money
6 to 12 months
Tiny positions in a regular cash account, so mistakes cost little and you keep your tax-sheltered accounts out of it.
Keep a full record
1 to 2 years
A journal of every trade, fee and result. If it does not show a profit after costs for a year or more, you do not have an edge yet.
Only then think about scaling up
Years
Most traders who succeed kept a job until their record covered several years and their savings could cover a year of losses.
Data management or statistics
Trading is about odds over hundreds of trades, not being right once.
Advanced functions and calculus
Percentages, compounding and risk sizing are daily tools.
Economics
Interest rates, inflation and earnings reports move prices.
Computer science
Coding lets you test an idea on past data before you risk money on it.
Accounting
You need clean records for the Canada Revenue Agency either way.
You need no licence to trade your own money. Canada never had the American $25,000 pattern day trader rule, which the US scrapped in 2026 anyway. Margin is set by CIRO (the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization) and your broker. Managing other people's money or selling trading advice needs registration with your provincial securities commission. Online promoters who are paid to push a stock must say so, and the Alberta Securities Commission fined one YouTube finance creator $30,000 in 2025 for not doing it.
The CRA (Canada Revenue Agency) looks at how often you trade, how long you hold and how much time you spend on it. Frequent trading can be treated as business income, which is fully taxed, instead of capital gains, where only half is taxed. Day trading inside a TFSA (Tax-Free Savings Account) is risky: if the account is found to be carrying on a business, its profits are taxed after all. The Tax Court ruled exactly that against one trader in 2023.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Risk a tiny slice per trade
Often 1% of the account or less, so no single loss can wipe them out.
Stick to one market and one method
They know one setup deeply instead of chasing every tip.
Measure everything
Win rate, average win and loss, fees and currency costs, in a spreadsheet.
Stop trading on bad days
A daily loss limit, and they walk away when it hits.
Keep other income
Many successful traders also teach, write, code or work part time.
The Canadian Securities Course
The standard industry course from the Canadian Securities Institute. Not required, but a solid grounding.
Python or another coding language
To test a strategy on years of past prices before risking real money.
Six to twelve months of savings
Living costs covered, separate from your trading money.
An accountant who knows trading
Business income or capital gains is a judgment call worth getting right.
Much of what you see on TikTok and YouTube is selling something: a course, a monthly signals group on Discord, or a broker sign-up link that pays the creator. Screenshots of big wins are easy to cherry-pick. An OSC (Ontario Securities Commission) survey found about 35% of investors had made a financial decision based on a finfluencer. Ask any seller for audited results across all their customers. Few can show them.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
Markets in Toronto and New York both open at 9:30 a.m. Eastern, so traders in Vancouver start at 6:30. The first hour is the busiest, with fast decisions and real money moving. Late morning goes quiet, so you review trades and update your journal. Some traders stop by noon. Others trade again near the 4 p.m. close. Many days the best decision is to do nothing at all.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
One trader put $5,000 a year into his TFSA (Tax-Free Savings Account) from 2009 to 2011 and day traded it to $617,317. The Tax Court ruled the account was running a business, so the gains were taxable.
In the Brazilian study of almost 20,000 day traders, only 0.5% of those who kept going for over 300 days earned more than a bank teller's starting salary.
In Taiwan, 74% of all day trading volume came from traders with a history of losses. People kept trading despite the evidence in their own accounts.
Trading and investing first, then the rest of the field. See all online and self-made careers.
Last checked October 2026. This is self-employment, so there is no government wage data for it. The income figures come from the studies and platform data listed above.