Just out of curiosity how would you find stocks with great volatility? Someone told me that an intraday trader should try to find these stocks to trade on, that and great volume.
OP Ensure you know the difference between volatility and momentum Volatility masks piss poor trading skills - will make one think (falsely of course) they can trade The greater volume - agreed Like Arna stated - stock screener.., or study charts ============ You serious about learning - take 1 instrument - doesn't matter which - and dedicate your self to studying it daily - for the next year or so All instruments through various cycles - some cycles last for years / decades - need to learn these RN
Yes i am dedicated and yep its gonna be a long hard road. You said to use screeeners but criteria should i punch in?
Have you tried this? Finviz has one of the nicest free screeners around the interwebs. Many brokers have good real-time screeners such as IB.
Use criteria which are focused on volume ratio - mostly when something unusual is happening on stocks - the volume is 5-10 higher than normal.
^^^This. And also keep in mind there is more than one parameter that you can use to measure volatility. This includes but is not limited to beta, price change over x period of time, historical/implied volatility, some ATR calculation, etc.
OP was pretty specific about "volatility". Finviz lets you screen on weekly or monthly SV. Selecting price > $30, volume > 1M and weekly volatility > 5% gives a nice short list of 16 stocks where the action is. If you're with IB the market scanner lets you do similar filters on realtime data. For instance you can filter on minimum price and volume like above and also look for gappers (up or down). Stocks that gap up/down can be very profitable for a day trade.
That's exactly right, I day traded IBM for 4-5 years, only stock I traded at the time, you learn how it trades and often it responds same ways, you learn when it topping and when continuation of trend. I would stay in some trades 30 minutes. Now rather trade high flyers and only stay in them minutes. But still rather do CL, ES, NQ, GC, and ZB.