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.

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 for Beginners

Any discussion about day trading strategies for beginners would be incomplete without mentioning the different types of trades that can be done on an intraday basis. Although I will definitely cover some of the major ones with this post, I know that I can’t ever consider my writings to be “comprehensive” about this topic, because there are tons of different ways to squeeze profits out of the markets on a fairly consistent basis. The problem for most traders is really not an issue of lack of technique, or lack of available trading methodologies, but rather a lack of personal discipline in the implementation of those techniques and methodologies. This unruly beast known as lack of self-discipline has been the ruin of many a trader. In the world of trading (and in day trading especially), the truth of the matter is that the internal aspects of trading really play a significant part in how your trading account balance looks. We would like to believe that maybe it’s just our moving average indicators, or our review of the commitment of traders report or something like that, but at the end of the day, most traders sabotage themselves due to their own negative or self-defeating mentalities. This is something that no trader is exempt from; in a way, your very attitudes about money and how you relate to money will play a part in whether or not you’ll be able to make money in the markets, and even more important, when you make the money, whether or not you’ll be able to KEEP the money. Some traders literally overtrade, and end up losing all of their previous gains. They go through this vicious cycle over and over again, and at the end of the year, they don’t really have any actual profits to show for it. If you look at their brokerage account statements, they’ve had a flurry of activity all year, but at the end of the year, they’ve barely broken even, or even may be sitting with losses. If you think about it, doing something that way is really a total waste of time. You could save yourself a lot of stress and time and just blow your money on slot machines if that’s how things are going to end up. So it would behoove us as traders to spend some time planning and thinking through a definite trading methodology, and also take some self-examination time to find out why you really want to trade in the first place. Some people, believe it or not, don’t even trade because they really want to make money; some people trade for the sheer excitement of it, and this holds true especially in the world of day trading. They’re simply thrill-seeking, and the evidence of this is their lack of operating by a specific trading plan. It’s more about just throwing mud against the wall and seeing what’s gonna stick, and honestly, to many traders, it’s just another form of playing the lottery. So before we can even get into any type of day trading strategies, again I believe it is absolutely vital for us to identify our true motives for trading. Some people may think that this kind of talk is borderline “psycho-babble”, and it may seem like a bunch of psychological hogwash, but the very roots of our behavior towards trading and money itself are oftentimes the subtle and unseen part of us that governs our trading behavior. Think about how many times in your trading career where you added to a losing position in hopes of it miraculously turning around, or how many times you entered a market late due to nothing but the pure hype surrounding the market. Think about how many times you hung on to a position that was obviously (and painfully) losing money, only to see that position just get worse and worse, because you couldn’t stand the thought of being wrong about your market bias. All of these things come into play when dealing with the whole of what it takes to be a day trader, so these things must be dealt with in order to keep them at bay. Until then, it’s almost useless to even consider developing specific day trading strategies; you’ll just end up frustrated, because in a sense, you’ll simply be trying to teach an old dog new tricks. I know I didn’t get into any specific day trading strategies for beginners (or any other strategies, really), but I strongly feel that these types of issues need to be addressed before moving into more specifics. Keep tuning in for more…until then, keep trading.

Day Trading for Beginners (Part 2)

In my previous post I talked about day trading for beginners and how important it is for you to know what you’re getting ginto when you begin day trading. Actually, make that BEFORE you even begin to get into day trading. The thing that I want to focus on with this post is how important it is for you to commit to eduating yourself about trading. Education is the most vital element of your trading career; you should never stop learning, no matter how many years of experience you rack up as a day trader. Gaining a solid trading education will build the confidence in you to really take calculated risks with your trading. But if you’re really more of an “action person” that would rather dive in without properly educating yourself first, you’re going to pay for it with cold hard cash. I can tell you from experience that that’s not the best way to go. Having blown several accounts out already, I believe I’m qualified to tell you that a little patience goes a long way. Whether you trade the stock markets, Forex or the commodtity markets, the basic principles are the same—you’re better off taking your time paper trading for a while & learning the markets before you commit real money to it. Don’t get me wrong, there’s no substitute for real-world experience when it comes to trading, and emotions are totally different when paper trading vs. real money trading, but still it’s a good thing to do just to take time & learn the “personality” of whatever market you’re in. There are many day traders that focus on only one market and do their best to “master” its movements and nuances…that can be advantageous because it helps you to keep from getting distracted and becoming the “jack of all trades but master of none”. I have a trader friend who only trades the E-mini S & P 500 and he kills it on a regular basis. Many traders who adopt the “tunnel vision” style note that you can learn a market’s peak hours and regular movements upon open or close if you stick to studying just that one market. For instance, for a little stint I was day trading Corn, and I noticed that Corn’s volume normally is huge right at the open, and then lulls during the early-to-mid-afternoon time period, and then jumps again within an hour before close. I also learned that if any real move was going to be made, it would happen during the first two hours of market open. I have had instances where I have made $250.00 in a matter of ten minutes just by sliding in & out of Corn. This is definitely not a science, but an art. Some would debate me even saying that about day trading; yes, I agree that it can be standardized and put into neat formulas by very smart people, but I do just fine by keeping it on the “art” side.

Looking back on what I’ve written so far, I realize that I didn’t actually stick to my initial intedned topic which was education for beginner day traders, but hey, you can’t win ‘em all. I’m signing off, but I know that I’ll continue to cover more day trading for beginner topics with some future posts.

Day Trading for Beginners

Well, I’m giving a big shout out to everyone who may be reading this blog…I’m heare to talk about day trading for beginners. One thing that all of us who are currently investing in the stock and commodity markets have in common is the facdt that we all at one time were beginners. There’s hardly anything more intimidating to a newcomer to the markets than the jargon and the terminology and all of the other stuff that makes up the whole base of trading knowledge that you have to have to be able to function in the marketrs. Please forgive my crappy spelling; I can be the world’s worst at proofreading my writings, because honestly I’m not sure if I care enough to go back an fix my mistakes…I actually just want to write what I write as fast as possible…I’ve found that I can type a lot faster when I’m not backpacing every other word to fix it. LOL

A Little Bit About Day Trading

Day trading is not for the faint-hearted. It’s definitely not for the investor that has a gambling or lottery mentality. Yes, you can score big with day trading, but you can also lose a HECK of a lot of money if you’re not careful and conservative with your trading practices. If you hate to be wrong, you’ll really be put through the ringer in the markets, because day trading is not about getting every single trading prediction correct, it’s about two words and two words only: CAPITAL MANAGEMENT. If you can master capital management and learn how to conserve your treading capital, you can absolutely make it in the markets as a day trader.

So What is Day Trading?

Day trading is basically a trading methodology where you enter and exit a trading position on the same day. Some people have had the mistaken notion that day trading means you trade every single day, but that’s just not the case. All it means is that you enter and exit your trade on the same day. “Day trader” doesn’t mean “daily trader”—there is a difference.

As you may or may not be able to tell, day trading takes a lot of discipline, which is why a lot of traders fail. This is not a game for the sloppy investor, or the emotionally-out-of-control trader. Day trading requires you to reign in all those impulses and ego that cause you to bail out of winning trades too quickly (because you want to “prove” to yourself that you’re right) and stay in losing trades too long (because you want to “prove” that you’re not wrong). I’ll put this warning out there for anyone who’s reading, and I’m sorry in advance if I turn off some people from even wanting to try this style of investing, but if you cannot control your emotions, and if you don’t know how to separate your feelings from your trading decisions STAY THE HECK AWAY FROM DAY TRADING. There…somebody had to say it.

But anyway, being that this website will teach day trading for beginners, I hope that you will at least stick around because if nothing else, it will be entertaining (LOL), but hopefully you’ll learn some good trading principles that can really beneifit you in the long run.