Cousin says he clears $150 a day trading with a $6k account — is anybody here actually doing this?

The academic work on this is consistently grim — the studies I have read follow retail day traders over years and find that the large majority lose money, with the losses concentrated among the people who keep going longest. I am not going to quote you a precise percentage from memory because I would get it wrong, but the direction is not in dispute and it has been replicated in several countries. If your cousin is genuinely profitable he is in a small minority, and the honest question to ask him is what his return is net of every fee and how many hours a week it takes.

If you do it anyway, size it as entertainment rather than investment: an amount you would be annoyed but not damaged to lose entirely, in a separate account, with no top-ups, ever. The no-top-ups rule is the important one and it is the one everybody breaks.

Before anything else, check the mechanics where you live, because they may make the plan impossible. In the US, if you are placing four or more day trades within five business days in a margin account you get flagged as a pattern day trader and have to keep $25,000 of equity in the account, and below that the broker restricts you. So a $6,000 account making daily trades is not a smaller version of the same activity, it is a different and more constrained thing. Rules change and other countries differ, so confirm with the broker rather than a thread.

Fourteen months, real money, roughly $9,000 starting. I finished down about 11 percent before you count my time, and the interesting part is that my trading was near breakeven — commissions, spreads and two very bad days accounted for almost all of it. I was up in month three and completely convinced I had found something, which is the phase your cousin is probably in. The single most useful thing I did was keep a spreadsheet of every trade from day one, because it removed my ability to remember the year as better than it was.

I know two people who do this full time and neither of them would recognise your cousin's description. Both treat it as a job with capital requirements: six figure accounts, defined risk per trade in the small fractions of a percent, and roughly a third of their months are losing ones. Neither has ever described a daily income target, because a daily target is what makes you take a bad trade at 3pm to hit the number. That framing alone is the part I would push back on.

One thing worth saying plainly: nobody in this thread is qualified to tell you what to do with $6,000, including me, and if this is a meaningful share of your savings it is worth an hour with a fee-only adviser who does not sell products. That is a boring answer and it costs about what a bad afternoon of trading would.