I am a complete beginner, where to learn day trading stocks?

XRSIL · Jul 27, 2020

Captain Caveman said:
Been around the block for many years now. Trust me, the overwhelming majority of gurus and educators are completely full of sh@te. Think about it logically, if you wanted to build a reputation as a trainer what would be the best thing you could do? Get audited and verified P&L trading accounts and do live streaming (not upload a video after the session). Every company has to do it for accountancy reporting and its a massive boost for the clients . So why not trainers. They would gets thousands of followers willing to pay a lot!. How is it the youtube guru always seems earn 10x more than the winning teams at various trading championships.

Most trading books are just full of fluff and can be reduced by 70%, they go on and on about topics like money management risk etc, Sure it's vital but its a easy topic that any one can talk and sound like an expert. It's akin to telling someone who just bought a sports motorbike, 'make sure you wear a helmet and don't crash into a wall or you will become a vegetable for the rest of your life' All well and good but doesn't teach you how to ride a bike.
You mention Dr Alexander Elder, I was on his site Spike Trade for quite a while. His group consistently underperformed the S&P and his best gold star traders barely out performed it.
Books get 5* reviews by people who are living on the "promise" of making money . Books and trainer can help speed up the learning process, nothing more.

100% best way in my view is to just try try and try again. Ignore every f@cking cherry picked chart anybody shows and starts talking about the middle of the chart (You can use it to understand the concept) To evaluate a strategy , open up your own chart and jump back 1000 bars or so and just go through it bar by bar and ask yourself , ok what will I do here, what pattern am I looking at ? How much will I risk etc. Its tedious as sh@t but its a true test. Trading is not hard, just a long long road it's like anything in life, playing piano or whatever, you need to just get stuck in and practice practice practice. The good thing is that you can be dumb as a bag of bricks and be successful at trading. Look at all the nonsense around fibonacci as it if it has some magical meaning. Mathematically it's irrelevant for movement of stock prices however its still useful as many other traders believe it. That's the key concept.

My personal view is don't use sims for any more than a few weeks if that, I'll bet every person giving you that advice didn't do it himself or doesn't actually trade much. just do cheap as you can, even if you lose 10 x $5 in a row, its only $50 but the 10 losses in a row really have an impact mentally. In a sim if you lose $1000 you will forget it in an instant . If you are one of these nerds that need to use a sim for a year, you are far too cautious in life and not suitable for all the ups downs, mental strain that comes with trading.
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Thank you a lot for advice. I will continue reading, but will put everything in actual trading. Actually it’s been almost 4 months since I’ve started trading, and I lost around 40% of deposit, which is about 40$. I’m not sure how bad is that, but I hope that doesn’t mean I will not be able to finally create profitable strategy

GrowleyMonster · Jul 27, 2020

Practically everyone loses at first. It is understood at Poker, that your first 100 games are nothing but lessons and that those lessons will cost money. Trading is not so different in that respect. You can learn a lot by paper trading and you should paper trade for a while, I don't care what anyone else says about it. The real lessons are trading with real money and real conditions. And those lessons are not free. First thing you learn in poker is to manage your risk and your roll so you live to play another day even if you take a beat. Same with trading. You are gonna lose. That is almost certain. Small losses you just have to figure are your tuition fee. If you are absolutely certain you want to trade, you have to accept those small losses and move on, but KEEP THEM SMALL. Sooner or later you will hopefully make enough substantial wins to start making up for the losses. Maybe your losses will get fewer and farther between but not by much. You will ALWAYS have lossy trades. You will have occasional drawdowns. If you keep your losses down to a reasonable number and as small as possible, you have a chance. A CHANCE, not a gaurantee. Most new traders end up quitting due to unacceptable losses and lack of progress toward profitability. Even if you are on track for eventual success, it will seem, from a standpoint of P/L, expenses, and hours spent at the computer, to be a monumental waste at first. I am STILL going through that though I do get my nice win streaks now and then of course. Small account, small risk, small profit, small earnings per hour. That's just the way it is.

Right now, these last few weeks, everybody SHOULD be a winner. Yeah it is supposed to be a zero sum game but the fact of the matter is, despite our best efforts, the market as a whole has been growing. Sometimes there is a little piece of the pie for the little guys, too. In a strong bull market if you are not making money at all, something is wrong. You could buy and hold QQQ and not even check on it, and make SOMETHING in a strong up market. So if you are losing money right now, you need to examine your trading and analyze your mistakes. Probably the most common mistake is buying when a stock is up, not down, and selling when it is down, not up. It's that simple. Apart from poor risk management and undisciplined position sizing. I know, that doesn't help you much, but think about it. When are you buying? When a stock is shooting up like a rocket? Or when it is in a dip in the middle of an up trend, or consolidating for another push up? When do you sell: when it has dropped a bit and you want to contain your losses? When it has reached your profit target? Yeah you need to set a stop. You also need to set it with enough room for normal down twitches. But first you need to have a logical place under a probable line of support to place your stop all figured out, before you open the position. Profit target? Yeah keep that in mind too but don't automatically close out just cause you reached your target if it is still going up; sometimes it is better to just move your stop up tight under it so it can run up some more if it will. Have all three parameters, buy price, stop, target, already figured out before you go in, and also your position size, risked amount, profit amount, profit/risk ratio. Oh no, my stock is going down! SELL! SELL! Don't let it be a surprise. Make it just an alternate event and decision path. Otherwise you will never be buying it cheap but you will often be selling it cheap. That is how you lose money trading long positions in spite of being in a bull market.

If investors who check their stocks once a day at most, and practically never sell, are making money, then you as a trader need to be making way more money than them. If you aren't, then you got to figure out what you are doing wrong.

XRSIL · Jul 27, 2020

GrowleyMonster said:
Practically everyone loses at first. It is understood at Poker, that your first 100 games are nothing but lessons and that those lessons will cost money. Trading is not so different in that respect. You can learn a lot by paper trading and you should paper trade for a while, I don't care what anyone else says about it. The real lessons are trading with real money and real conditions. And those lessons are not free. First thing you learn in poker is to manage your risk and your roll so you live to play another day even if you take a beat. Same with trading. You are gonna lose. That is almost certain. Small losses you just have to figure are your tuition fee. If you are absolutely certain you want to trade, you have to accept those small losses and move on, but KEEP THEM SMALL. Sooner or later you will hopefully make enough substantial wins to start making up for the losses. Maybe your losses will get fewer and farther between but not by much. You will ALWAYS have lossy trades. You will have occasional drawdowns. If you keep your losses down to a reasonable number and as small as possible, you have a chance. A CHANCE, not a gaurantee. Most new traders end up quitting due to unacceptable losses and lack of progress toward profitability. Even if you are on track for eventual success, it will seem, from a standpoint of P/L, expenses, and hours spent at the computer, to be a monumental waste at first. I am STILL going through that though I do get my nice win streaks now and then of course. Small account, small risk, small profit, small earnings per hour. That's just the way it is.

Right now, these last few weeks, everybody SHOULD be a winner. Yeah it is supposed to be a zero sum game but the fact of the matter is, despite our best efforts, the market as a whole has been growing. Sometimes there is a little piece of the pie for the little guys, too. In a strong bull market if you are not making money at all, something is wrong. You could buy and hold QQQ and not even check on it, and make SOMETHING in a strong up market. So if you are losing money right now, you need to examine your trading and analyze your mistakes. Probably the most common mistake is buying when a stock is up, not down, and selling when it is down, not up. It's that simple. Apart from poor risk management and undisciplined position sizing. I know, that doesn't help you much, but think about it. When are you buying? When a stock is shooting up like a rocket? Or when it is in a dip in the middle of an up trend, or consolidating for another push up? When do you sell: when it has dropped a bit and you want to contain your losses? When it has reached your profit target? Yeah you need to set a stop. You also need to set it with enough room for normal down twitches. But first you need to have a logical place under a probable line of support to place your stop all figured out, before you open the position. Profit target? Yeah keep that in mind too but don't automatically close out just cause you reached your target if it is still going up; sometimes it is better to just move your stop up tight under it so it can run up some more if it will. Have all three parameters, buy price, stop, target, already figured out before you go in, and also your position size, risked amount, profit amount, profit/risk ratio. Oh no, my stock is going down! SELL! SELL! Don't let it be a surprise. Make it just an alternate event and decision path. Otherwise you will never be buying it cheap but you will often be selling it cheap. That is how you lose money trading long positions in spite of being in a bull market.

If investors who check their stocks once a day at most, and practically never sell, are making money, then you as a trader need to be making way more money than them. If you aren't, then you got to figure out what you are doing wrong.
More...

Thanks for answer. First of all, you completely described my mindest - I understood I would lose, and I was able to lose 100$, but also I was going to everything to minimize losses. And yeah, I do have diary of trades, I make screenshots of each chart I traded and put some notes about what I did wrong and write, that it’s easier to understand mistakes at least for me. Thank you a lot for information you gave me, but honestly most of the stuff you told me I already know. Still thank you so much! I really appreciate all this help I got from this thread.

ironchef · Aug 2, 2020

Captain Caveman said:
Been around the block for many years now. Trust me, the overwhelming majority of gurus and educators are completely full of sh@te. Think about it logically, if you wanted to build a reputation as a trainer what would be the best thing you could do? Get audited and verified P&L trading accounts and do live streaming (not upload a video after the session). Every company has to do it for accountancy reporting and its a massive boost for the clients . So why not trainers. They would gets thousands of followers willing to pay a lot!. How is it the youtube guru always seems earn 10x more than the winning teams at various trading championships.

Most trading books are just full of fluff and can be reduced by 70%, they go on and on about topics like money management risk etc, Sure it's vital but its a easy topic that any one can talk and sound like an expert. It's akin to telling someone who just bought a sports motorbike, 'make sure you wear a helmet and don't crash into a wall or you will become a vegetable for the rest of your life' All well and good but doesn't teach you how to ride a bike.
You mention Dr Alexander Elder, I was on his site Spike Trade for quite a while. His group consistently underperformed the S&P and his best gold star traders barely out performed it.
Books get 5* reviews by people who are living on the "promise" of making money . Books and trainer can help speed up the learning process, nothing more.

100% best way in my view is to just try try and try again. Ignore every f@cking cherry picked chart anybody shows and starts talking about the middle of the chart (You can use it to understand the concept) To evaluate a strategy , open up your own chart and jump back 1000 bars or so and just go through it bar by bar and ask yourself , ok what will I do here, what pattern am I looking at ? How much will I risk etc. Its tedious as sh@t but its a true test. Trading is not hard, just a long long road it's like anything in life, playing piano or whatever, you need to just get stuck in and practice practice practice. The good thing is that you can be dumb as a bag of bricks and be successful at trading. Look at all the nonsense around fibonacci as it if it has some magical meaning. Mathematically it's irrelevant for movement of stock prices however its still useful as many other traders believe it. That's the key concept.

My personal view is don't use sims for any more than a few weeks if that, I'll bet every person giving you that advice didn't do it himself or doesn't actually trade much. just do cheap as you can, even if you lose 10 x $5 in a row, its only $50 but the 10 losses in a row really have an impact mentally. In a sim if you lose $1000 you will forget it in an instant . If you are one of these nerds that need to use a sim for a year, you are far too cautious in life and not suitable for all the ups downs, mental strain that comes with trading.
More...

I agree and appreciate your comments.

The hard lesson was I realized I had to figure it out myself and I finally did.

themickey · Aug 2, 2020

XRSIL said:
First of all, I'm only 18, and I hope that is not too late to learn, so in maybe 3-5 years I can day trade for a living. I started on the 4 moths ago, I am very into it, I have already read some books, watched a lot of seminars and have some really basic knowledge about stock market and how it works. Though I spend hours to learn, most of my day I usually spend trying to figure out some trading questions.

As I am from Russia, firstly I started searching for Russian mentors and stopped on Alexander Gerchik. I do understand that mostly he makes money from his teaching courses, but all of it seems actually working. I do not pay anything for his teaching, cause his 1500 course I illegally downloaded from torrent tracker, because I had no clue would it worth it or no, and still I have no idea how useful it is. But for now I'm taking this course and spend a lot of time analysing charts, trying to understand reasons why price moves up or down. I do not know mentors should I trust, I'm not even sure there are any of them who are actually reliable.

I really want to find here people who are already professional traders and who can tell me, how have they've learned to trade, something about their path. What books and researches they've read, or maybe which mentors they've found. This would be very helpful for me right now, because I now do not have structured system of learning how to trade. I just don't know where and how it is better to start due to lack of experience.
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Hi, you've just registered on ET, welcome.
My suggestion, tag along each and every day on this thread.
https://www.elitetrader.com/et/threads/es-journal-2019-2020.328086/
You will learn a lot here from these guys and gals.
Each year OP (original poster) 'Buy1Sell2' begins a new journal for the year which follows on from the previous year.
If you click on "Follow this Thread" which you will find at the bottom of each page of every thread, what this allows you to do is see the latest updates from when you last read a thread post and you can see this by clicking on 'Followed Threads' which is in the blue band near the top of each page.
There is a huge amount of useful info in this thread for day traders and even longer term traders.
This is a great thread, lots of fun.
There are some smart traders who post here, all willing to help if you keep yourself sounding humble and reasonably non combative. (That rules me out, hehehe, joking, or am I...)

themickey · Aug 2, 2020

If you find posters sound really interesting, experienced or helpful, you can tag those posters by clicking on their username then click 'Follow'.

Then each new day maybe, you can click on your name which you will see top right hand, then click on "Your News Feeds".
This will highlight all the recent posts of those whom you are following.

Stevekinghan · Aug 3, 2020

Too late to learn at 18, whoa! You’ve rather gotten a headstart starting so young. I hope you’re gonna start with a demo account and stay with it for a few months, before trading live.