How to Day Trade: Establishing the Foundation

If you’re interested in learning how to day trade, the first question I’m going to ask you is “Why?” Not because I don’t think that day trading is a worthy pursuit, but rather to help YOU identify the real motive or motivation behind your desire to trade. As I mentioned in my previous post on how to learn to day trade, to answer “money” to that question is many times not looking deep enough. One person may say “Well, how deep do you really need to look? It’s just trading.” Believe me, if you’re interested in learning how to day trade and make some real money day trading, you will not be able to escape having to answer that all-important question. Day trading is such a level of emotional and psychological warfare, if you’re not ready for it, and if you’re not grounded in your real reasons for doing it, you’ll cave at the first adverse market move, or the first time you have a string of losses you’ll begin to doubt yourself, doubt your abilities as a trader, and with enough crappy trades in a row you’ll begin to be afraid of your own shadow. You’ll get to the point where you “scare easily”, and that will eventually lead to more and more losses, as the slope just gets more and more slippery. Again, the term “whipsawed” will take on new meaning if you allow your trading to be subject to your emotions and your passions regarding money. The thing that we all have to face is that the so-called “perfect day trading system”, or the perfect set of trading signals doesn’t really mean a thing if you’re still dealing with greed. Greed is based in fear (you’re afraid of never having enough, so you continue to clamor to get more and more), and that fear will be your motivation to sell at a loss to keep from losing more money, and it also is the motivating factor for buying into a stock only after it has taken off, to get in on the hype. These crazy emotions that drive us to do illogical things for unlikely payoffs even in the midst of completely undeniable evidence to the contrary can be our ruin, if we’re not careful. Nobody is exempt from greed, and greed is something that you can’t necessarily see in the mirror. And regardless of what Gordon Gekko said, greed is NOT good, especially if you plan on making a career of day trading, or if you expect to have any shred of long-term profitability trading the markets. Day trading is a powerful method for achieving profits in the markets, but your foundation must be properly set in order to be truly effective. Again, you must identify the “Why”. Once that is done, there are technical things and trading techniques that you can learn to pull profitable trades, but they must be used with prudence and patience. That seems almost contradictory in such a rapid-paced trading environment as day trading, but patience is still a virtue, because for some people, even day trading doesn’t move fast enough to keep up with their greed. But enough of my philosophizing; let’s talk about a day trading technique (or two, if time permits). I spent some time in a previous post talking about scalping trading, which is one form of day trading. Another technique commonly used by day traders is called “fading” the markets. Basically what you do is you wait for a stock (or commodity futures contract or currency pair) to rally, and once you believe the rally has stalled out or is on its way back down, you begin to short the market at your best guesstimate of where the rally has topped out. Fading is based around that age-old principle that “What comes up must come down” (Spinning Wheel, anyone?). A lot of times a fast buying wave (a.k.a. rally) will drive up prices temporarily, but not enough interest is there to sustain the rally and maintain the new upward price. At this point, prices begin to show weakness, and eventually they slide back down, many times in very short order. When this type of thing happens, you have a great opportunity to short the rally and then cover your short (i.e., liquidate your position) when prices decline once again. I have a friend who does these types of trades with the E-Mini S & P 500. He has the daily price and volume trends down to a science. He knows what type of spikes the E-Mini is going to get in the morning time, and he plays them well. I explained in my previous post how cool scalping (well, my version of scalping anyway) is, and how you don’t have to have a huge spike in prices (if you’re long) or a freefall in prices (if you’re short) to make money; you can make money with one small uptick if you have enough contracts to make a significant profit on a per-contract basis. If one uptick in Corn equals $50.00, if you’re trading 100 contracts of Corn, you now have made $5,000 in one uptick. That’s pretty sick if you think about it. These techniques, my friends, represent just one school of thought on how to day trade. There are several more, but so far, these are the ones that I can say I understand best and favor the most. More on this at a later time.

Learning to Day Trade: Make Sure You Check Yourself

The title of this post is somewhat of a charge, or even an admonition. I encourage everyone who is interested in the financial markets to any degree to learn to day trade. I believe that in order to become a well-rounded trader, you cannot pigeonhole yourself into one particular trading style. Yes, after a while you may find your particular flow and stay in that flow because it’s producing results for you, but in my mind you should never be afraid to experiment, within reason. Now that doesn’t mean that you go and blow your money on poorly planned trades; it means that you approach each type of trading discipline with enough information to make solid trading decisions, and then move forward with a well-thought-out and well planned trade, implementing a trading style that has a specific anticipated outcome. One of those trading styles that has definite merit is day trading. Yes, it has received bad press due to some people that truly were not emotionally or psychologically ready to day trade but yet tried to put their entire trading account up for one trade and basically “bet the farm” on a lucky chance and then subsequently lost everything and killed themselves; this obviously has shed a bad light on day trading, to the point where the “official” trading advisors have recommended that the average investor should stay far away from day trading. I will have to say that I partially agree with that, due to my understanding of the nature of human beings. If you are the kind of person that has any type of gambling tendencies, or depends heavily upon luck (i.e., you buy lottery tickets every week and actually believe that you have a fighting chance), it would probably be much better for you to never even touch day trading. Any type of personality that makes money their “god” also should never get involved in day trading. Any person that doesn’t know how to handle financial losses, or is not very skilled in money management, definitely does not need to try day trading. I will also say that the person who uses their mortgage money or their car payment money to trade with needs to stay the heck out of the markets. You never, ever, ever risk more money than you could comfortably lose. It’s never a cool thing and it should not be an “exciting” thing for you to trade next month’s rent money just for the “thrill of it”. Believe it or not, some people trade for no other reason than they crave some excitement in their lives, and they don’t have any outlet other than trading. In their minds, the possibility of making or losing money on a high-stakes trade is almost like a joyride. Then, when they rise high and fall fast, they’re left to pick up the pieces, but deep down in their hearts, they found some sort of emotional fulfillment in the mental roller coaster that just took place. All of this stuff can really hinder the pure trading process, and it can really cripple people financially. As strange as it might sound, you actually have to have the right motive for trading in order to trade successfully. In other words, you have to actually want to make money. Your sole objective needs to be to earn a good return on your capital invested, leaving emotions, thrills and chills completely out of the equation. This one point is so vital to understand, and I’m telling you, so many traders skip right over it without ever considering whether or not it applies to them. The truth of the matter is, you can forget about learning swing trading, day trading signals, or any type of stock trading systems if you don’t settle this vital issue first. Why do you want to trade? No really, why do you want to trade? I feel like many of us have to have a “Good Will Hunting” moment where we face up to ourselves before we can really ever become effective day traders. Although I highly encourage everyone who is interested in the financial markets to learn to day trade, that’s the one signpost along the way that I believe everyone needs to take heed to. Without that question being settled first, any attempts to day trade will only produce a limited degree of success. Well…I’ve given you enough to think about for this post…I’m out, until next time.

Scalping in Day Trading

For a long time, I’ve been a fan of the scalping trading style. It’s one of the most reasonable ones in my book, because it’s based on the simple premise of getting in and getting out as quick as possible, with little thought to what the market will be doing in a few days from now. There are actually two different sides to scalping, or in my mind two different basic definitions of scalping, with only one being the one I want to focus on with this post (I’ll tell you which one that is as we go along). Again, the basic principle that I think of that makes scalping work is that you don’t have to be right for a very long time…you can be right for only just a couple of minutes and make money scalping. But man, if you try to put on a trade for the long haul, as in weeks or months, you’re really going to run into a case where you’re going to have to be right for a much more sustained amount of time. I’m telling you, it’s much easier for me to predict what the market may do within the next 15 minutes as it is for me to predict what it will do in the next 15 days. With a smaller time frame perspective, the trade just seems a little more manageable to me. Of course, if all of us could predict the future, we would have bought Gold back in 2007 when it was only at about $500.00 an ounce. And even back then, that was considered a breakthrough price. But human nature being what it is, and the nature of the markets being what they are, nobody really could have known how far Gold was going to go up—as of this writing, it’s over $1,000.00 an ounce. Unreal. That’s a whole other story…I was trading Gold options in 2007, and believe me, there are times now where I look back and think about totally revising my trading philosophy based on what has happened. But alas, it’s much better to formulate and stick with a plan than it is to keep bouncing back and forth and “chasing a moving bus”, trying to get in on a market move that has already taken off. There are ways to do it, if you are a somewhat skilled trader, but please don’t try to chase a market if you’re a novice trader. You will experience what’s known as being “whipsawed”, which is just as bad as it sounds. You’ll get tossed around the markets like a balloon at a 3-year-old’s birthday party. Again, it’s better to use a disciplined trading approach, based on recognizable chart patterns, than to try that crap.

But on to the business of scalping. And man, let me tell you, it is a business. The first definition of scalping—the one that I’m NOT going to use for this post—is that of taking advantage of disparities between the bid and ask prices on a stock, or futures contract, or forex currency pair. This is a very common practice in the trading world, performed by traders and market makers the world over. Basically, the bid price is the give-it-to-me-right-now price that people are willing to buy the stock for (I’m using stocks just for the ease of the example, but it applies to futures and forex as well). The ask price is the give-it-to-me-right-now price that people are willing to sell their stock for. When there are discrepancies between these two prices (which most of the time there are), you have what’s known as a spread. The spread is where market makers make their money, and where they’re able to “scalp” profits from trades. The whole business of scalping wouldn’t do nearly as well as it could if it were not for people willing to use market orders to enter a position—this is the “give-it-to-me-right-now” price that I was referring to earlier. The type of scalping I’m talking about is of a slightly different order, but based upon the same basic thing. Basically, my version or definition of scalping (and I may be the only one who understands or accepts my definition) is when you buy (for example in the case of futures contracts) several futures contracts, wait for the price to rise the slightest little bit to where it’s showing a small amount of profitability on a per-contract basis, and then immediately sell as soon as the per-contract position becomes profitable. This may seem like a herky-jerky way to do things, but believe me, there’s a method to the madness. Let’s use Wheat for an example with this—as you can tell, I love trading the Grains. Wheat has a tick value of $50.00, meaning if Wheat goes from 300.00 to 301.00, the per-contract value has increased by fifty bucks. Now think about it: The average online commodity broker will charge roughly $25.00 round turn for commissions and fees, and less if you trade a whole lot of contracts on a monthly basis. Many brokers provide a commission scale that’s based on the amount of trading activity you crank out on a monthly basis. If you’re considered to be an “active trader” by your brokerage (and most day traders are), that usually means you trade hundreds of contracts/shares/currency pairs per month, and when this happens, you are usually qualified to receive lower commissions, sort of like a volume discount. Now back to my Wheat example…let’s say you buy 10 contracts of Wheat at 300.00, and in just a few minutes the price fluctuates a little, but ends up popping over 302.00. You place an order to exit your position with an absolute limit exit price of 301.00. You end up exiting at 301.00, with a gross profit of $50.00 per contract. Think about it: You just made $50.00 per contract, and since you have 10 contracts, it only took one small uptick to make $500.00. Now take away an average of $25.00 commissions and fees per contract, and you’re left with $250.00 profit (give or take; again, this could greatly vary based on whether or not your broker offers discounted commissions). Not bad for a few minutes worth of work. Even if you only did this every day, you’re looking at about $7,000 a month. For some people, that’s a great supplemental income; for many, it would even replace their current full-time income. This, my friends is the scalping trading method. Okay, I have written way more than I planned on writing, and I’m ready to drink some chocolate milk, so I’m signing off. Later.