Day trading destroys wealth as reliably as any casino, and the mechanism is identical: the house takes a cut of every transaction regardless of who wins. Every time you open and close a position, you pay spreads, commissions, and in the United States, short-term capital gains tax at ordinary income rates, currently topping out at 37%. The market has to move in your favor just to get you back to even. This is a negative-sum game before you place a single bet on direction. Then comes the chart. Technical analysts sell the fantasy that a triangle pattern forming on a 15-minute candlestick chart of Tesla stock reveals something about the future price. It reveals nothing. Prices coordinate dispersed, real-time information held by millions of actors simultaneously, and that information changes constantly. No chart captures what Elon Musk will tweet in four minutes, what a pension fund in Oslo decides to liquidate this afternoon, or what a crop report does to energy futures overnight. The chart shows you the past. Only the past. The brokerages profit from your activity, not your success. TD Ameritrade, Robinhood, every platform selling you the dream: they earn on volume. Your losing trade is as profitable to them as your winning one. Retail day traders as a group underperform a simple index fund over any ten-year period studied, losing to both the market and inflation simultaneously. Capital deployed in a productive business compounds. Capital churned through a trading terminal evaporates, steadily, into fees and taxes and the inevitable bad week you did not model for. Stop staring at the chart. Buy the business.