Each stock is unique, like a woman so I don't use 5 cents. I use support/resistance (trend line, gaps are also support/resistance). Use them for stop loss. You can make more by planning your trades. When you have confidence then you can make more and don't get stopped out so quickly. This market is extremely volatile so follow your trades extremely carefully. Trade fewer stocks so you cam watch your trades with 4 eyes ( I wish). If you not comfortable with day trading yet then pick about 3 stocks that move slower to practice. The ones that are not so volatile and if you loose while practicing, it doesn't kill you. For example EW is a slow stock to trade. It has good fundamental and you can trade long without shorting. AKAM is not moving that fast either. Enough to make some money, not like AAPL, BIDU or GOOG. JPM is not moving as fast as GS. DIG FXI USO UCO are slow moving ETFs to me. I trade these often too. Read read read...know your stocks more than your lady!!!!!!
cyber, again thanks greatly!!! not sure if we should continue this in public thread or if u want to PM me, but can you give me advise on share size? when i started i was buying 1000 but now that i know better 1000 seems huge. i know it has to be enough to cover the broker fees. when i first started i was reading HH/HL up trend and LH/LL downtrend. play short on the LH and play long on the HL. funny thing is very rarely do i see charts that perform like that. am i looking in teh wrong place??? thanks again
I trade everyday and trade very few stocks. I trade aapl, goog, amzn, qld, qid. I trade basically 1-2 patterns that work well on these stocks/etfs and just keep increasing size as I have done well over the past year. I started trading 100-200 shares on goog and 300-400 on aapl and i am up to trading 300-400 on goog and 1000 on aapl, Watching only a few stocks and only using a couple of set ups is a very good way to trade imo. The best trading advice I have ever given is to trade to your personality. I am a person who needs routine thus I trade based on a set routine. Hope this helps. Atrader
atrader, do you mind explaining one common set-up that works for you? also in general what is your profit to loss raitio 3/1? i know it is different all the time, but just curious. i started by trading appl. made $1500 in first two days, then lost $4k. i just could not believe that a $100 stock was dropping under $90 because an anylist downgraded. i would buy long it would go down .50 and stop me out then on what looked like a reversal, buy long and get stopped out, another .50 gone. 1000 shares in total $4 over 2 days in december. very amateur, i know.
Chucky, I've struggled over the last month and a half, and am basically flat over that time, but last year was great, and I feel like I'm coming back out of my recent funk as of late. Am I successful? I make money trading if that answers your question. First trade as a full time trader was in August of 96. Took many "breaks", over time, ie Financial consultant at Ameriprise for a while, and came back full time 2 1/2 years ago. Haven't looked back since. I trade mostly stocks and the occasional SPY. I don't use any indicators other than the NYSE tick. But more importantly, I've been focusing on strong and weak stocks relative to what the market's doing. You really need to read this thread. Dustin's contributions are absolutely priceless. http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=117547 Of course you need experience. You're new. That's only natural. And you're not getting short for a very good reason: You know (I assume you know, subconsciously or otherwise) you can get your head handed to you in a massive snap back bear market rally. No one with any sense of risk management is getting short here for day-long trades, hoping the market continues down, because they know that one rally will decimate their account. You just don't know where the market is going to finish at the end of the day. If you're going to day trade, start by reading the thread above, and forget about catching the day-long moves, and get the home run mentality out of your head (if it's there). As Robert Weinstein has said (See the P/L thread) you need to be willing to make less on a trade than you originally anticipated. BTW to the OP, I used to trade GS every day, all day, and it was actually a pretty good learning experience, because any given stock can change it's characteristics many times throughout the trading day. Ie., GS could be strong relative to market from 10 to 11, and then reverse that behavior the following hour. Turns out, this behavior is much easier to discern by picking out the strongest and weakest stocks of the day. Hope this helps.
I been day trading for 16 years/28 years longer term. Day trading first IBM, then big S&P's futures, Currencies, and Financials, I think I have ran the gamut of almost every way to trade them including flipping a coin. I occasionally go to Traders Expos for a vacation and see if anything is new. I attend the cocktail party for kicks and us "old guys" can spot all the "fresh meat" in the room. It gets to be humorous, I know, me bad. Inexperienced traders have an opinion, I don't, I follow a well backtested method with min of 3000 sample size covering min of five years. Young traders want to know your pattern of entry, but they don't have a clue what to do after entry. Matter of fact, you need to test when not to trade even though you may have a pattern to enter. Maybe some news report is coming out, coming up to last weeks/months high/low, high volume area, too much support to sell. Then the bigger picture, what happens after you are "in", what are you going to do to manage the trade, where is your protective stop going? How far does the market need to travel in your direction for you to move your protective stop to breakeven plus one, you want lock in enough to cover commisions/slippage. How about a time protective stop, if after so many bars the trade can't get to so much profit for breakeven stop to be moved, it will be moved. How about an extreme minus stop, say risking 25 cents, the market goes 22 cents against the position, my new target will now be my entry price so I can just get out at breakeven. What if last trade was a loser, should I target what I lost to produce a smoother equity curve? What is my losing percentage? And believe it or not, that is more important to me than the winning percentage. Is my Reward to risk enough? How much profit do you need to racket your trailing stops, are you going to take partial profits along the way and where? Previous highs/lows? Bollinger bands? And what about the bars themselves, I like to view the last few bar's range, if they are small, they might creep up all day long, if they are larger - there might be only 2-3 large bars and may have to get out faster. What about times of the day? What about cash Dow +/- 50? What about gaps larger than 3.00 points in ES, what does that mean? What is the percentage of yesterday's close being in today's range? What about the spread between the ES and T-notes? What can you do with this information? Possible targets. So you want to be a day trader..... But instead at the parties I get asked "what is your setup to get in", inexperienced strain to look at each bar trying to find a reason to get in, I am checking all my reasons to stay out, I like sitting on my hands, I wait wait wait, I will wait there all day long and if no trade comes up, I had a good day. But I do many trades a day over several futures and IBM, just waiting for a couple patterns. Doing stocks, find uptrend on the dailies, then find 3 of them that has retraced a couple days in a row, now more likely to go back up to test recent highs. Find 3 in a daily downtrend, find 3 that have retraced a couple days, more likely to go down to test the lows. But still must wait for chart pattern, triangles, flags, rectangles. Got to go now, have my dose of Geritol. Handle
NO and NO AGAIN. a good trader goes where the money is. i trade a different stock everyday thats what makes trading interesting. what if aapl or goog are'nt doing anything,then what? they always have volitility but its usually at the open before it establishes a trend.
depends on how much money you are trading with right, i mean if you have a large account you need smaller moves to make what you want to make versus a guy who has much less money trading and needs much bigger swings, no?