The More You Day-Trade, the More You Lose: The Real Cost the Rich Never Pay for Short-Term Trading
You stare at the screen all day, buying and selling, but the account keeps getting thinner. Using Taiwan Stock Exchange rules — brokerage cap of 1.425‰ and day-trade transaction tax of 1.5‰ — this article calculates the real cost of churning a NT$1 million position in and out daily as a NT$68,000 monthly loss before you even make a single profitable trade. It then uses the Taiwan 50's 7%–9% annualized return over the past 20 years to contrast the 20-year gap between 'day-trade every day' and 'just hold and forget.' Also included: four day-trading iron rules and a four-step action plan. TWSE data shows day-trade volumes exceeded 40% of total trading at the peak around 2021, but the share of consistently profitable day-traders is extremely low and still falling. Even with a 55% win rate, academic simulations show that after costs, the long-term net return converges to zero or negative.
