Independent fan guide. Details reflect the launch patch (v1.0.3) and cite official sources; if the game updates, in-game text always wins.
01What pops Day Trader
Day Trader asks for exactly one thing: buy or sell 100 shares in a single day. That is Steam's verified wording, letter for letter, and 25.0 percent of players worldwide own it — one worm in four. On the rarity curve it sits in the comfortable middle, just under Book Worm's 34.6 and just above Is This Even Legal? at 20.5, which tells you most players earn it somewhere between the perk grind and the printer phase, accidentally, without ever aiming at it.
Aiming at it deliberately is still worth ten minutes of planning, because the achievement fits naturally inside a day you were going to trade anyway. The market runs on news and voicemail tips, volume is free to generate, and one Financial Insight perk turns a hundred orders of clicking into a single held key. This page covers the condition, the honest reading of it, the setup, a full trading-day walkthrough, and the mistakes that leave players stuck at 99 shares when the progress report prints.
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Condition | Buy or sell 100 shares in a day (Steam wording) |
| Rarity | 25.0 percent of players globally |
| Prerequisite | The stock app, open from your first tradeable stock |
| Tool that trivializes it | Financial Insight perk: hold Shift to buy in bulk |
| Best moment | A dip day with a voicemail behind it, mid-week, webcam fund untouched |
02One order or a hundred clicks?
The wording is "Buy or sell 100 shares in a day." Read it again: there is no "in a single order" anywhere in it. The practical reading — the one community guides work from, including the Russian all-achievements walkthrough — is that the day's total volume counts, so ten orders of ten shares and four orders of twenty-five are the same achievement. Nobody has published official documentation of the counter, so we will be straight with you: the wording supports cumulative volume, the community plays it that way, and no report contradicts it.
The same wording contains the word that saves everyone time: or. Buying 100 shares in a day satisfies the condition on its face, and you never have to sell anything — which matters, because your own selling pushes the price down around you. If you are the cautious type, and achievement hunters usually are, there is a route with zero interpretive risk: one clean bulk order of 100 shares, placed with Shift held down, and the condition is satisfied under every possible reading of it.
One genuinely open question sits under both readings: nobody has verified whether buys and sells sum together, fifty bought plus fifty sold, toward the hundred. The wording's "or" suggests either side alone qualifies, which makes the question mostly academic. Academic, at least, until you are sitting on 99 shares and one sleepy worm.
03What you need first
Market access comes in stages. The stock app on your work computer opens with a single tradeable stock; the L-shaped desk at $1,000 plus its contract paperwork — sign, print, scan, return, the whole Kafkaesque chain — takes you to three stocks; and a later phone call grants full access to the portfolio. Strictly speaking you can day trade from the first stock, but by the time you have the cash to cycle 100 shares comfortably, you will almost always have the desk anyway. The desk is not the obstacle. Cash is.
The tool that matters is a Financial Insight perk: hold Shift and the market buys in bulk. With it, 100 shares is one decision and one key held down. Without it you are pressing Buy again and again, headbash by headbash, and a hundred of anything one press at a time is an afternoon you could have spent getting promoted. The perk tree lives in the Reading Nook — the community reports the nook costs all of $10 — and reading pays out best after 9 p.m., so a few evenings of the snake-style minigame buy this entire achievement.
Capital is the last prerequisite, and the softest. You need enough that cycling 100 shares does not wreck the portfolio, not enough to park 100 shares forever. The sizing logic gets its own section below; the short version is that this achievement is a reason to trade big on a day you were trading anyway, and never a reason to trade big on a day you weren't.
04When to attempt it
Sizing first. A hundred shares of a $56 stock — the verified Technis Corp. screenshot price — is roughly $5,600 of position. You do not need that sitting idle, because the condition is satisfied on the buy side alone and shares you buy can be trimmed later at a better moment. What you actually need is enough capital that a 100-share fill, plus the slippage your own orders cause, does not dent the week's plan. If buying 100 shares would empty the account, you are early. Wait a few days and let the interns help.
Timing second. The obvious window is a dip day with a voicemail behind it — the setup the dip-buying guide covers in detail — because volume is free when you were buying anyway. A bearish calendar event works too: selling 100 shares before bad news lands is simultaneously the correct trade and the achievement. What does not work is interview eve, with the webcam fund committed and the soundboard pending. Generating volume with earmarked money is how a casual achievement becomes a $3,000 problem.
There is a middle path between buying and forgetting worth naming, because it is how most players actually fund the day: cycle the position. Buy the hundred when the dip arrives, trim pieces into strength during the afternoon if the chart obliges, and keep whatever is left as the hold. The cash from the trims goes straight back to work — interns, the Reading Nook, the trampoline you still need for the printer — and the buy side of the cycle has already done its job for the achievement. Cycling also keeps you honest about sizing: if trimming thirty shares feels like relief rather than profit-taking, the position was too big.
The day boundary is your clock. Sleep ends the in-game day — skip it and the game ends it for you around 3 a.m. — and the nightly progress report prints your earnings and net worth as a receipt. Place the hundred shares in the middle of the day, not at the edge of it, and let the evening be for the Reading Nook or for M.
05A realistic trading day, hour by hour
Here is a full day, assembled from what verified playthroughs actually look like, with the volume woven in. The thesis in this scenario is a bullish voicemail — say a defense-contract tip — because that is the classic setup: news you can act on before the chart does. Swap in any tip you actually received; the shape of the day does not change.
The mirror-image day works just as well and suits a different week. Say the calendar shows an orange event for the phone maker — the company that recalled 100,000 phones in launch-week streams — and you are holding its shares from a better era. The day's job is the exit: sell the hundred into strength before the news lands, in pieces if the position is big enough to move the chart, and let the bearish event happen to somebody else's portfolio. Same market app, same hundred shares, opposite button, identical achievement.
Not every tipped day cooperates, so know the bailout in advance. If the dip never comes and the chart grinds upward all day, the achievement does not require heroics — a bulk buy at the market price still counts, and paying a slightly worse price for 100 shares you meant to own anyway is a rounding error next to an afternoon of staring. If the tip was clearly wrong and the stock is falling for a reason, the sell side is right there: 100 shares sold satisfies the same condition. The only unforgivable version is forcing a trade with no thesis at all.
- Out of the plant pot: check the wall calendar for orange events, play voicemails before anything else, and roll the d20. The tip is the thesis.
- Before 10 a.m. is the gym window if you are training — a hundred shares carries easier on a fresh worm.
- Mid-morning, grind spreadsheets: five files inside 24 hours is a $200 bonus, and it pays for the shares you are about to buy.
- Midday, open the market: confirm the tip's stock, wait for the dip, then hold Shift and buy in bulk — 100 shares, one order, done before lunch.
- Afternoon, hold. News moves this stock over hours, not minutes; check the chart between tasks instead of babysitting it.
- Early evening, re-check the calendar for anything dated tomorrow. If bearish news lands overnight, trimming into strength before sleep is both correct trading and a completed achievement.
- Night: read the progress report, sleep properly, and decide tomorrow whether the position is a hold or a trim.
06Pair it with the rest of the money list
Day Trader slots into a money day rather than demanding one of its own. The dip day is the natural host: same market app, same voicemail, same hundred shares, one extra line in the plan. If your bank account is anywhere near the mark, the churn day is also a fair moment to check the balance, because 10% of the Way to Buying a House — owned by 10.7 percent of players — pops on having $100k in the bank, not on any particular trade.
Downstream, the shares you bought become income. Trading profits funnel into interns at $400 apiece, and buying ten of them pops Valuable Work Experience at 29.3 percent. The Financial Insight grind that earned you the Shift perk is the same grind that ends at Book Worm, 34.6 percent. Claim the WormTok reward for Day Trader itself once it pops: every achievement has a claimable on the Smartphone, and Worm-fluencer, at 7.8 percent, is mostly a claims-screen chore.
And for the four percent: Transcendental Invertebrate, the unlock-everything achievement, sits at 4.0 percent and needs this one like it needs all the others. There is no version of 100 percent that skips a hundred shares. May as well make them good shares.
07Mistakes that cost the day
The expensive mistakes are capital mistakes. Chasing volume with money earmarked for the webcam — the $3,000 one, with its early-purchase soft-lock bug — turns a casual achievement into a setback. And buying 100 shares fast into one stock runs you into the game's quietest mechanic: your own orders move prices. One player pushed a stock past $100 per share with nothing but their own repeated buying. If the chart starts running away from you mid-fill, some of that run is you; pause and let it settle rather than bidding against yourself.
The cheap mistakes are attention mistakes. Trading without a tip, on a chart you merely like the look of, is gambling in a game that hands out scheduled news for free. Holding through a bearish calendar event to avoid selling "early" confuses two different trades. And misjudging the day boundary — assuming the counter resets at a clock midnight rather than at sleep, or the reverse — is unverified either way, which is exactly why the hundred shares should be finished well before bedtime, not at 2:50 a.m. with a pass-out looming.
The last mistake is philosophical: selling positions you believed in purely to hit a number. If the thesis is intact, the shares were the point and the achievement was a side effect — the buy side alone satisfies the wording, so a worm with a good hold never needs to become a forced seller. Day Trader at 25 percent is not worth betraying a 17-percent-kind of overnight hold for.
08What we still don't know
Fees, first. No verified source documents a trading fee or commission anywhere in this game. Orders may genuinely cost nothing beyond the share price — the interface shows none — but "the interface shows none" is not documentation, and this guide will not pretend it is. Until the developer publishes mechanics notes or someone tests it properly, treat zero fees as likely but unverified.
The counting details are similarly foggy. Whether buys and sells sum toward the hundred, whether volume can be spread across all three of your stocks or must sit in one, and exactly when the daily counter resets — at sleep, at a clock hour, at the progress report — are all undocumented. Community guides, the Russian all-achievements walkthrough included, play it as cumulative day volume and get on with their lives.
None of the fog touches the plan, which is the point of building the plan around one clean bulk buy. A single Shift-held order of 100 shares, placed mid-day, on a tip you trust, with the webcam fund untouched, satisfies every possible reading of the condition at once. When someone nails down the counter mechanics, this page gets updated. Until then, the safe route is fully paved.