Day Trading Strategy

Okay, I’m about to get Sun-Tzu on everyone and talk about day trading strategy. There are several approaches you can take to actually execute your trades, and believe me, I’m the kind of day trader that believes that it’s better when you keep it simple. There are people who are so wrapped up in chart reading and technical analysis that they have 537 different indicators they’re monitoring (Williams %R, Relative Strength Index, Gann lines, etc.), and they have so many different multi-colored squiggly lines and graph-looking stuff overlaying their price charts that it ends up looking like a Kandinsky painting. I can’t even function properly with all that stuff going on. Just give me a basic chart pattern, such as a symmetrical triangle or flat-top triangle, and that’s pretty much all I’ll need to know how to react to a market move. A lot of times it’s just a matter of feeling out the general sentiment of the market by studying it every day before even dropping one dollar on a trade. What do I mean by this? Well, take the futures market for example...I have noticed that Corn always has a certain level of trading volume in the morning hours that sort of slopes off towards lunchtime, and then increases again near the end of the trading day. If you could see the volume on a chart, it would look like a horseshoe, because it’s high on both ends, but dips in the middle. A day trader would take advantage of this situation by finding out the general market bias as soon as the opening bell rings, and then basically “riding the wave” until the tide changes. One thing to note is that if the market comes out the gate swinging, the sheer momentum of the collective traders’ bias will normally keep the market moving in that direction. What do I mean in specifics? Okay, let’s say that you see Corn opening up strong, possibly three or more cents higher than the day before. What do you do? Well, while there may be slight corrections during the day, the mere “shock” of Corn opening that high in comparison to where it closed the day before will spur some upside trading activity. I had a situation like this a few years ago where Corn opened up with a bang—some 3 cents above the previous day’s close—and I immediately placed a buy order to get in as fast as I could. I knew that the sheer momentum would allow me to take some quick profits. And, I was right…within one hour, Corn had traded 5 more cents above the early morning opening price, and I had made a quick $250.00 (well, a little less after commissions and fees) within about a two hour span. Folks, this type of stuff happens all the time. I am a big fan of just getting in and getting right back out as soon as I’ve locked in some decent profits. I figure that I can be far more accurate with my predictions if I’m only looking about 2 hours into the future versus trying to look one month into the future (or futures—okay, bad pun). If you think about it, you don’t really even have to have a strong price move if you use leverage to your advantage. You can simply buy more contracts up front, and then you have leveraged your position to the point where even the slightest little “blip” in a trading day can make you large amounts of money. This is a slightly different day trading strategy known as scalping…I’m going to go into this in a little more detail in my next post. Hope you’ve enjoyed this little bit of insight into the mind of a day trader…again, I may not be the most sophisticated one, and I’m definitely not the most wealthy one out there, but I’ve made some darn decent coin in my day. Until next time…keep the faith, whatever that means.

Day Trading Strategies

Okay, so now it’s time to dive into the “meat” of some common but yet effective day trading strategies. As you well know, the price chart is the king of all tools to help you discover which stocks are profitable for day trading, and which ones to stay away from. Now, I know that right now one of the main questions in your head is probably “Well, among the thousands of stocks that are available to day trade, where do I even start?” I would recommend picking stocks that have lots of daily trading volume. By “lots” I mean stocks that trade in the tens of millions of shares every day. This way, liquidity concerns are alleviated right off the bat. By “liquidity”, I mean how likely it will be that you can enter and exit the market with reasonable ease. This is a must for the day trader, due to the very nature of the day trading methodology. If you can’t enter and exit a market in seconds, it’s going to be very difficult to maintain the control over your position necessary to generate profits. You must, must, MUST have high liquidity when day trading; that’s the very nature of the game, so to speak. One of the things that high liquidity will do for you is give you a much better chance of avoiding slippage, which is basically when your entry (or exit) order gets filled at an undesirable price…this usually means that you get filled at a couple of points or “ticks” higher than you’d like on your buy orders, and you get filled at a couple of points lower that you’d like on your sell orders. Slippage sucks…I have witnessed it first-hand, and it’s a major factor especially when you use market orders, which I normally advise against. Market orders are basically orders that are supposed to be filled at the prevailing market price, or at the current price that the market is trading at. But, of course, you’re living in a fool’s paradise if you think that’s what actually happens. There are many stories of floor traders taking advantage of market orders by front-running and doing other types of “trickery” to make quick profits off price disparities in the orders they’re filling. So even with day trading, unless you are wildly confident, I would still recommend using limit orders, because you don’t want to find out what price you’ve entered the market only after you are in the position; you may find that it’s several points above (or below, depending on whether you’re long or short) your intended entry price. Bottom line to what I’m saying? USE LIMIT ORDERS. Limit orders basically guarantee that you’ll enter the market at your own predetermined price, and not be at the mercy of the floor brokers. This could mean, however, that you may not get filled at all; this is part of the price you’ll have to pay in order to maintain more control over your trading position. With the type of day trading I do, this setup works perfectly, and limit orders have never really been a problem, even in relatively fast-moving markets. I’m not the “millisecond” day trader; I’m more of a relatively slow day trader, meaning I can enter a position in the morning and not sell until the afternoon. I’ve done this many times, and made money trading this way many times. It works for me, but I don’t expect it to be THE way for any other person. We all have to experiment, identify our own trading temperament, and then develop our day trading strategies around our trading personality. This is the best way to keep yourself on the winning side of the markets, because now your trading style is consistent with your overall personality and risk tolerance. There really is no other way to go. Okay, gonna stop for now, but I’ll be picking up again in a few…er…well, we’ll see. LOL!!!

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.