We have our "boot campers" choose about 15-20 stocks (simply from 3 or 4 sectors, large cap, high volume NYSE companies)...for their "opening only" orders each day....same group every day. Then from that group, the find that they develop a good "feel" for a couple stocks, and use them as their "bread and butter" (primary) stocks to trade...day in and day out. Filtering is not a good idea, because you end up playing in some else's "poker game"...sure the stock may look good on a filter, but you will trading against those who trade it every day....kind of tough.... Hope this helps... Don
what??? Every day I personally trade a little over 1% of the volume of a 10M shares/day nyse stock...my style is to scalp (obviously) and I could never succeed without high liquidity. There are many reasons to trade thick stocks, but the most important is that you can usually get out quickly if your trade goes against you...stocks like HI or COF will often freeze the book, not letting you have any stock when you need it. Look for stocks that have a great deal of arb activity, like C (which I usually trade 100k shares per day).
Yes! GE is great: over $20, extremely liquid, and the specialist doesn't need to play games to make a market.
In my opinion, those stocks are very difficult to trade for a beginner. They are extremely thick, and very hard to get a read on. A beginner should not focus on those stocks, especially if you're learning to tape read. The action is so fast, and the prints are so large, that you're only able to focus on one, maybe maybe 2 of those stocks. So you're only really learning how those one or two stocks move and act, and not building a general base for all stocks.