I don't recommend prior unless on a very long-term horizon with high reward potential, relative to risk.
You can't hedge your positions correctly without paying a premium. Although, if you've got access to IPO listings before the first sale you can make significant profits.
I started day trading 2 months ago (previous experience: long-term trading). Not successful at day trading at the moment, but minimal losses. Managed risk well on my losses. I took a break for 2 weeks for my vacation and also to reevaluate my strategy and go over all my executions. I realized that the most successful trades came from stocks that had gaps on opening, double the relative volume, and high volume. Those stocks would more likely have the patterns/breakouts that I was looking for.
%% Since most gaps, gap with the trend; go with the trend.On a single stock ,if the earnings shock against the trend, help the bears sell
%% Exactly. But i look @ fundamentals for fun,2. I would like to buy - help Houston oil , OXY. And its a gap up in uptrend,[ SPY usually a good buy. Good dividend yield; good PE=2,959, but i seldom buy below 50 day moving average, so it's not a good buy for me, its good bye to OXY. Must be a related SPY buy......
This is pretty much what i'm doing. There appear to be people making money everyday using the same sort of setups as me, but there seems to be some sort of magic skill in taking the right trades and ignoring others. I seem to always get in the wrong ones, lol I'm down a few hundred bucks today on stocks. LUCKILY I have my reliable ES market which I only ever LONG which has more than made up for the losses on the equities trading. (always goes up basically, lol) I've already linked 2 channels who do what I wish I could do. Here's a 3rd to show I have no bias, lol However, as I suspected, I think ET is now just futures traders, really. Need to find a good equities forum to find like minded people trading a similar strategy
I got in touch with 2 traders that have been interviewed on Chat With Traders. One of them spoke to me about looking for stocks that have gapped up in the previous day and had big moves and also in the morning, stocks that have gapped up during pre-market. He did mention that he's interested in why it gapped up. The second trader told me he focuses on a relative volume above 1.5x, small-caps mostly.
I've been following Meir, Andrew Aziz, Jared Wesley and a few others who trade gaps now for a while. I am in the same boat as you. Studying and sim trading then live trading for about a year now, I still have not found the consistency that these guys pull off day to day. One small red day out of five for them is normal with winnings days $1000+. The strategies they use are all similar - big gaps and ORB, pullbacks (reversals Meir calls them, ABC by Aziz and a Buy/Sell setup for Jared) and your typical breakout/breakdowns. I too take a lot of the entries that they do but I also try to do my own homework and take trades that fit the strategy but these guys seem to have a sixth sense as to which setups will work most of the time and skip the ones I take (and lose on). It's funny because I'll email them from time to time with charts and they'll say "oh yeah, great entry but it just didnt' work out....." on the trades I do take but they didn't at the time. Maybe I just need more screen time or perhaps I'm missing something (money management issues?).