The one rule that anyone who has even thought about day trading has heard a thousand times is that the market is never wrong, this advice is generally followed by some generic sayings such as the trend is your friend, don’t fight the market, and develop your own strategy.
While all of these pieces of advice are relatively useful, it seems many new day traders under emphasize the last point (develop your own strategy) and fail to find a method of trading that matches their personality. In my experience it is the lack of a defined strategy that is the reason that so many fail to find success in the markets. So here are a few basic questions to help beginning traders filter down their options and try to find the strategy that best fits their personality.
Within day trading what is your time period? Seconds? Minutes? The whole day?
When making this decision it is important to ask yourself how you perform best; are you willing to continue holding a position if it begins to move against you or would you rather participate in short bursts and exit at the first sign of reversal? Are you up to the task of making countless instantaneous decisions and synthesizing multiple streams of data at a rapid pace? Or would you be better at highlighting particular stocks the night before and then waiting to see if they meet your entry criteria the next day, thus allowing for more emotional detachment and mechanical decision making.
How much are you willing to risk and what are you paying in commissions?
Although it is important to find the day trading timeframe that is right for you, the trading fees you pay and your level of capitalization can limit which strategies you can employ as a day trader. For example, if you are stuck paying a 5 dollar commission and are only risking 1000 on any given trade that means you will need a 1% return per trade just to break even (10/1000= 1%, 5$ for entry 5$ for exit). Day trading is hard enough but going up against that kind of built in disadvantage makes it near impossible.
What markets and securities are you going to trade?
What markets you decide to trade have a tremendous effect on what type of analysis you will be doing as a day trader. For example the trader who chooses to follow a breadth of large cap securities will be forced to keep up with the news for all sectors of the market whereas a trader who only focuses on securities in a given sector will spend much more time monitoring only the catalysts for his or her basket of stocks. However day trading need not be limited only to stocks, with the wide variety of commodity etfs and currency trading brokerages now more than ever investors can focus on asset classes that were not available even 5 years ago.
Regardless of what path you choose it is of the utmost importance that your trading style match your personality, because if it doesn’t odds are you won’t be a trader for long.
Author :
By: Andrew BB
Financial Freedom doesn’t have to be a mystery. Wealth acquisition is a skill that can be taught. Follow myself and others on our road to millions, and you might just get there yourself. 7m7y.com/2008/05/20/meet-andrew/