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.

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.