Day Trading Investing

Man, I’m fired up. I just watched some PBS special on the stock market crash of 1929, and how many of Wall Street’s most elite traders were able to profit to levels of insanity during that time. One in particular was Jesse Livermore, who is famous in trading circles because he was a chart reader and “technical analyzer” so to speak. He may have unwittingly been the father of day trading investing, because he made over $100 million virtually in one day during the 1929 crash. Again, for those people who truly understand how the market works, if a market crashes, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. If you’re ever short (i.e., entered the market on the short side) during a market crash, you’re laughing all the way to the bank. If you had shorted the Dow Jones Industrial Average index (ticker: DJIA) from November of 2007 to March of 2009, you would have seen it lose literally half its value, and hardly would have even had a losing day, because it just kept trending lower and lower during that period. Yes, this type of gradual (yet huge) downtrend does not qualify necessarily as a “crash”, because of the prolonged time frame, yet the principle is still there…a market going down can be a beautiful thing, in the eyes of the right “beholder”. But on to the topic of day trading investing. As I said in my last post, I’ve pretty much given up on trying to bring this information across in any kind of really organized fashion; you’re just going to have to depend on the old mantra—“More is caught than taught.” After watching that special, it lit a fire under my tail all over again as far as how limitless the stock market really is. And not even the stock market alone, but also the commodity markets and forex markets as well. You really have the right to “set your own salary”, so to speak. There’s nobody telling you how many shares you can trade or how much money you’re allowed to make (unless, of course, the government keeps buying up all of the financial institutions and so forth). There really is no upper limit…if that doesn’t inspire you, you may be in the wrong business. But as it pertains to day trading, although the sky is literally the limit, you won’t get past the rooftop without a well-thought-out trading strategy. This is why understanding chart patterns is such a vital thing. Chart patterns are what’s going to give you your “cues” as to when to enter & exit a market. Some people believe that chart reading is borderlining on some silly practice like astrology or something similar, but the truth is that nothing else can really be more indicative of a stock’s actual value than its price chart. The reason for this is that the numbers simply cannot lie. Fundamental news reports can lie. Company accountants can lie about the company’s earnings and revenues by redefining what an “asset” and what a “liability” are. But the one thing that always displays the cold, hard truth is the price chart. The price chart is what it is. All the flurry of the news and reports and fundamental data is great, but if you really want to know whether a stock, commodity, or currency is on the bargain counter, you have to go to the price chart to find that data. The price chart provides the only means by which you can see historical price data, to find out if the stock/commodity/currency pair is in its low or high range, in comparison to the lows and highs of the past. One of the best charting sites out there is BigCharts.com, a favorite staple of mine. BigCharts is mainly for stocks, but practically every online brokerage worth its salt will give you access to price charts with an active trading account. By the way, if you have an account with an online brokerage and they’re charging you extra just to look at the price charts, you need to change brokers fast. There are plenty out there to choose from to keep you from having to be stuck with some cheapo brokerage that doesn’t provide good, quality tools to its traders free of charge. This is a “hot-button” issue with me, as you can tell. I just believe that if you’re giving them tons of your money (in the form of commissions and fees) by being a frequent day trader, they ought to at least give you a reasonable deal on the essential trading tools you need to keep trading. Another great online broker that I have an account with is OptionsXpress. They are consistently rated as one of the top online options brokerages out there. I know that this blog doesn’t necessarily focus on day trading options in particular, but OptionsXpress also provides access to trading futures and regular stocks. Sorry for getting off on these tangents, but I felt it was important to mention the places that you can go to get good, quality price charts without a lot of hoops to jump through. But in the world of day trading investing, in my mind at least, the price chart is king, and any type of conclusions I’m going to draw about which market I’m going to be in are going to come from my study of the price charts. I don’t necessarily pick a market or a particular security or currency and then find out what I want to do from there; I look for which one has the most promising price chart and then begin planning my trading from that point. A true chartist understands that it really doesn’t matter which particular stock or whatever you choose to trade; all that really matters is what those little bars are telling you on the price chart. More on this later…I’m out for right now.

Day Trading Strategies for Beginners (Part 2)

Okay, based on the previous post, I promised that I would get into some more specific day trading strategies for beginners, so I plan on making good on that promise with this post. I’m learning more & more that I have to do my best to prevent “diarrhea of the mouth” with these posts, and just stick to the topic at hand. To be honest, that’s probably never really going to happen, because my brain just doesn’t work that way, but I can dream, can’t I? So, in my (somewhat feeble) attempt to stick to the subject, I’m going to go ahead and dive into some specifics where day trading strategies are concerned. I trade and have traded all different types of markets, including stocks, futures, options, and forex, and the one common denominator in all of my trading is that I rely heavily upon price charts. I honestly feel that there’s no other way to go but to use price charts to determine what my trading strategy is going to be. In my humble opinion, if you’re entering into a market, but haven’t taken a look at the price chart, but are only going off of fundamental data and statistics, in my mind you’re flying blind. Most of the time, by the time you actually read the reports or the headlines, whatever “big events” are supposed to shake the makrets have already been factored into the price. This is just a fact of life…most traderst that trade on fundamental data are very much late to the party. Price charts, however, give you the distinct advantage of noticing recurring patterns and trends that many times repeat themselves. It’s a lot like what a meteorologist does; they look at historical data and make a determination of how things are going to be tomorrow based on their historical data, but also mixed with a little bit of how the current conditions are. They don’t’ claim to know the future, and many times are dead wrong (as you will be too sometimes when you trade), but they’ve done a pretty decent job of being able to predict the weather on a fairly reliable basis. There are certain things to look for on a price chart that will help give you “clues” as to what may (and I stress the word “MAY”) be happening next. These “clues” on the price charts are revealed by way of chart patterns. The art of identifying chart patterns is a huge part of the school known as “technical analysis”. If you boil it down to its most essential steps, technical analysis is simply the study of price charts.

There are a lot of different tools and techniques that people use to perform their technical alnalysis, but at the end of the day, just looking at the overall direction of the trend is pretty much all you really need to know. I’m a huge fan of the book “Trend Following” by Michael Covel, and I’m a huge fan of the trading school known as the Turtle Traders. If you ever get a chance to check out those websites, do yourself a favor and do so, because it will revolutionize your perspective on trading. Solid trading is not built on never being wrong; solid trading is built on managing the losses when you are wrong, and absolutely milking your winners for everything you can when you’re right. It may seem funny that I’m a fan of those two books and that general school of methodology, because it normally applies to long-term trading rather than short-term, but I love the discipline that’s involved in their methods. At the end of the day, yes, a day trader’s transaction costs can far outweigh those of a less frequent trader, but using a disciplined approach based on money management and handling losses properly, the day trader can kick tail over a long-term trader any day of the week—just ask Marty Schwarz. He was clocking about $70,000 a day on average using “scalping” methods, which is basically entering and exiting a market at light speed, within seconds of each other, and doing it with multiple contracts to leverage small “blips” that happen during a typical trading day. Okay, before my hand starts cramping, I’m going to sign off on this post, but I have to take a second to look back and see if I stuck true to my word…okay, well, I did introduce the core foundation of all of my personal trading strategies, and that is studying price charts (i.e., technical analysis). I’ll have to go into detail about what happens during the actual trading process in future posts; I’m definitely not going to make any more promises about giving this beautifully packaged set of day trading strategies for beginners until I know that I’ve covered the basics to a decent degree. This is not to say that I won’t skip around and do some things in a non-sequential order…hey, I’m writing how I’m writing, and I hope it’s been useful.