What are other intraday traders doing to identify good stocks for the day? Are you doing this all prior to market open or scanning the market throughout the day? So far my process has been scanning for the most dramatic overnight increases and watching for how price support places to find shorting oppurtunities. Also look at big volume changers for volatlity. This typically gives me 4 or 5 good candidates, but most the correction to the rightful place is only in the first few hours. Feeling like a) I need to create a consistent process, b) need to not be scanning during market hours.
1) Trade a few, higher-volume, decently volatile stocks and leave it at that. That will give consistency to what you trade. 2) This way, you know what you'll trade each day and not waste time looking for something to trade. 3) You'll never pick the "perfect" stock but you can become more familiar with what you trade as you "invest" more time into the issue.
My basic discretionary trading method is: 1) Screen a select bunch of stocks in the daily time frame for predefined signals. 2) Pick the intraday set ups for entry, exit and target (the best looking from the screen). 3) Execute OCOs if the market cooperates and then manage the trades. My advanced method is automated trading with some higher-volume medium volatility stocks and ETFs in trends. These take more work to find, get operational and monitor. The reason I discretionary trade using the signal/set up is they have a high percentage success rate. The discretionary trades work great during congestion, high volatility or choppiness in the markets. When markets are trending I use mostly automated trading. When markets start to get congested, volatile or choppy I shut down the automation and trade almost all discretionary. I find the two methods work well together for me. Rarely do I get as big drawdowns as I used to get when I traded just one method.