DAY TRADING FANS KEEPING THE FAITH.

Byline: Barbara Correa Staff Writer

Remember day-trading? You were going to quit your day job and make a killing trading tech stocks on your home computer, like everyone else seemed to be doing in the late 1990s.

Now that the boom has bust and the dust has settled in the last three years, some people are testing the waters at day-trading seminars and industry confabs.

``People are saying, I was told buy-and-hold was the way to go. ... I've been beaten up in my 401(k) account, so I want to investigate other ways to generate income,'' said Tim Bourquin, co-founder of Online Trading Expo, a Laguna Hills group - formerly called Day Trading Expo - that runs trading and investing conventions across the country.

John O'Donnell, co-founder of Online Trading Academy, a day-trading school in Irvine, said there's no waiting list for classes these days, as there was before the market fizzled in March 2000. But students are trickling in - about 25 a month.

``It's not a revival yet. But there are rumblings of a revival. We've had a policeman from Long Beach. ... We get executives from middle management, a doctor burned out from practicing dentistry.''

The common denominator, he said, is that they have a passion for the stock market, they're over 40 and they have assets they want to manage. Some are coming from investing with a big brokerage firm and are dissatisfied with the performance.

That's what prompted Anjali LeBoeuf, a 46-year-old registered nurse in North Hills, to take control of her portfolio by trading it online at home.

``I was definitely inspired by my loss of funds in 2000,'' she said, adding that she lost 30 percent of a broker-managed portfolio full of biotech and high-tech stocks.

A family friend and longtime investor encouraged her to check out day trading, and last August she began two months of study before setting off on her own. She never trades more than 1.5 percent of her total account, and she says that, so far, she's in the black.

Traders like LeBoeuf have little in common with the online opportunists that helped give day trading a bad name.

``It's a much more educated person coming in, looking at it with some suspicion,'' Bourquin said.

That's exactly the way it should be looked at, said day traders who were in the business before it became hip and who watched the market swallow neophytes looking to make a fast buck and spit them out - eating up their savings, in many cases.

It's important that anyone thinking about taking up day trading be aware of how hard it is to learn.

``I look at it like surviving torture,'' said Ken Ruiz, 34, a former math teacher who ran up a debt studying acting before deciding to enter the day-trading world.

``You have to learn how to lose, and you have to transform your psyche. I think day trading - to learn it has been akin to trying to overcome an addiction,'' an addiction to winning, that is.

Ruiz, who trades at Bright Trading, a proprietary stock trading firm with offices in Arcadia, Long Beach and Westwood, said that, after a year at it, he's now starting to come to grips with losing on trades.

But his experience shatters any lingering perception of day trading of somehow being a way to make easy money.

``The market drew all those people in with dreams of riches and then the truth came out ... a lot of hype,'' said Christopher Worsh, a professional day trader and editor of Day Trading It, a daily stock picking newsletter. ``For the professional day trader, nothing has changed.''