You don't make several percent a day on an index, on the whole.
Sector indices, or their ETF's, are well worth using rather than the overall S&P, say. I'm not "timing" it, I'm reacting to what I see - same as any other day trader. MARA went up 12% yesterday, and back down again as suspected 9% today. So, depending when you could access it, that's 21% of movement you can profit from. That's a multiple of the 3% you'd get if you just left money in the stock. And that was twice as much as the sector as a whole, which was more than twice the index, and so on.
12 stocks in the S&P are up more than 100% (101% to 236%) in the year up to today. That's only 2.4% of the S & P, which only went up 25.8% .
You & I could possibly name many of those stocks. Apple, Google, don't actually make it.
If you picked a sector you'd do better, eg IT did 52%, Nasdaq did 50%, and the leveraged qqq5 did 438%.
I wasn't playing the game for most of the year, but when the Q's have done well daytraders have done much better. I'm not very good at it but yeah, floors wiped.
Even that qqq5 index DROPPED 50% or so percent mid year, so if you'd avoided that and made better use of the drop, you'd have cleared 600% easy.
There's another ETF, the TQQQ, which you can leverage 5:1 very easily. Well that's well over 1000% per annum, and if you avoided most of the drop on THAT.....
And you want to put your money on the Footsie 100?
Putting it all a different way, which index were you thinkiing of, and did it double in a year? Probably not. Doubling your money in a year only needs 0.3% per day. Given that you can profit just as easily from a falling price as a rising one, it really isn't very difficult to achieve doubling in a year.
And you want to put your money on the Footsie 100?
Here it is, 5.6% in the last year:
View attachment 326878
"Well, it would have been better than the Halifax"
Sure.