How’s this for the perfect job: You wake up at 9 a.m., sit down at your PC and sip coffee until the stock market opens. Then you buy 1,000 shares of a hot stock and immediately sell them for an eighth of a point profit. You keep this up for a while, and when you knock off for the day, your winnings may be $2,000. Repeat for a normal year’s 240 trading days, and you’ve made almost a cool half million. All without putting on a suit, sucking up to a boss or nodding off in a single staff meeting.

It’s called day trading. Thanks to a combination of falling computer and telecommunications prices and the kind of fawning press represented by the previous paragraph, a growing number of people are trying to beat Wall Street at its own game.

Serious day traders don’t use online brokers, which are great for buy-and-hold investing but inadequate for in-and-out trading. People who want to go pro use high-powered systems provided by specialized day-trading brokerage houses. Such systems offer a real-time window on the activities of Wall Street’s market makers, who are committed to buying and selling stocks on demand. The pro systems also offer order-execution tools that give day traders some of the advantages that market makers enjoy. Nationwide, there are probably less than 4,000 people trading this way, and maybe 100 of them are Virginians.

Typical of this new breed of day-trading firms is Richmond-based Traders Access. Located in a converted storefront on a gritty industrial street, it’s not the average person’s idea of a financial center. But its handful of traders are more interested in the numbers dancing on their screens than in their surroundings. Traders — they are customers, not employees — run the gamut from experienced, active traders to beginners a few weeks out of training. The former might do 30 or more trades a day and earn several thousand dollars, while the latter might not trade at all. "This isn’t for everyone," notes John Burkarth, a former broker who managed Traders Access for about a year. "But for some it’s potentially an amazing job."

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Unfortunately, day trading is also one of the world’s most over-hyped jobs: Early in 1998, Forbes magazine started the media frenzy with a cover story featuring a young Russian immigrant who claimed to earn $800,000 a year day trading. The New York Times quickly chimed in with an article about a day-trading florist who makes $175,000 a month. And, in a characteristic bit of great timing, Mark Friedfertig and George West, founders of a hot Manhattan based day-trading outfit, published "Electronic Day Trading," a book that shot to the top of the charts, at one point outselling the latest from Stephen King and Tom Clancy. By year-end it had sold more than 100,000 hardcover copies. That’s an amazing number when you consider that the book is about an industry that has fewer than 4,000 active participants.

Now, with interest soaring in this apparently easy road to riches, and no one regulating the field, hoards of unscrupulous entrepreneurs are selling the promise of instant wealth to the clueless multitudes. Training is frequently either haphazard or nonexistent, and some day-trading firms are even lending money to new customers. The result, predictably, is that "horror stories are way more prevalent than successes," says W. Scott Newsome, a veteran day trader who recently settled in Mechanicsville. "The vast majority of people who start day trading end up losing money and quitting within a year."

One Richmonder, who shared his story on the condition that his name not be used, recently began trading with a firm — not Traders Access — which, he says, "didn’t offer a lot of training," but did offer 10-to-one margin. That is, it allowed traders to buy or sell $10 in stock for every $1 in capital they put up.

During the next six months, he made a litany of mistakes, selling his winning stocks too soon and taking his losers home overnight. Even so, "I was doing all right until, for some stupid damn reason, I tried to short some Internet stocks." Short-selling is the practice of selling a borrowed stock with the expectation of buying it back at a lower price. Before the day trader knew what hit him, the volatile stocks rose far enough to wipe out his entire $40,000 in capital, and he quickly found another job.

With such cautionary tales becoming more widespread, regulators in some states are cracking down. Tom Lively, a former broker who is owner and founder of Traders Access, says he hasn’t heard of problems in the commonwealth. "But anytime somebody abuses things, people make some rule or regulation."

The State Corporation Commission in Richmond has not taken any action. And Virginia’s legitimate day-trading firms are quick to point out they are not the problem. "We offer extensive training programs, and we do not lend our traders money," says Whitney Wain-wright, co-manager of the Arlington office of day-trading giant All-Tech Securities.

His firm requires that new traders bring at least $50,000 in capital to the table. And it offers several levels of training, including a $3,000, one-week "boot camp" and a $5,000, four-week total-immersion course. Net Trade, a 20-person shop also based in Arlington, offers personal instruction from the founder, veteran day trader Todd Hawley, as well as courses ranging in price from $500 to $8,500. Lively notes that Traders Access recently hired Newsome to run a $1,500, three-week training program. Though hard numbers aren’t available, established day-trading firms claim that more than half of the people who complete their training programs go on to trade profitably.