I've been studying trading for a while now and think that day trading fits my personality best so that is what I have been focusing on for the past couple of months, and today was my first day of live trading. I learned so much more than I ever learned paper trading or sitting here reading about strategies. I was trading mostly citigroup (NASD:C). At the end of the day I was down about $200 and I can see why but don't really know how to fix it. My two biggest hurdles right now I think are fear and greed. Fear. I would go long at what I thought was a good position and it would continue to go up for a few ticks, around 5 or 10, then it would start to retrace and the time and sales window would be full of flashing red and I world get scared so I would sell at a small profit, or actually considering commissions none at all, but then five or ten seconds later it would shoot back up. Greed. I would be in a position and it would be down a couple of ticks and I would sit there and wait for it to come back up so I could break even or not take such a big loss and it would keep going down and I would convince myself that it had hit bottom and was due for a rebound and I would keep moving my stops down just a couple more ticks so I could stay in. Can any professionals out there give me any advice? I know this isn't something to be mastered in a day or even a couple of years but anything would be helpful at this point. Maybe someone can shed some light on how you go about picking stocks the day before.
Best teacher on the web is here: http://youtube.com/user/SnP500Trader Subscribe to his channel and reap the benefits. Paper trading is great, an awesome tool but is a whole different animal from the real thing. Steve
Your biggest hurdle is not your head -- it's amazing how quickly good timing solves those mental "blocks".
daytrading is tough...scalping for pennies is what you do in daytrading...if you want bigger moves you will have to think larger time periods like multi day...Maaybe you should think of swing trading.Look at medium/long term support and resistance and buy/sell off those areas. Right now its a brutal market.Unless you are experienced its probably best to sit back and paper trade through this mayhem.Lots of people are getting killed daytrading and picking bottoms.Maybe go long C when earnings come out this week but playing it in advance of that is really just madness.I played bac yesterday a couple of times buying it after it made new lows under 21.I made a grand total of 75$...whoooo-peee!Only traded 250 shares at a time...HAve to be very conservative.
Please tell me your heading was a typing mistake and that your first trading day didn't involve you getting fisted............
IMO a 5-10 cent move on citigroup is a nice move. As illiquid says, it's all about timing... if your timing is precise (that comes by watching the stock every day) you can go for 5-10 cents 10 times/day. If you have 5 10 cent winners, 5 5 cent winners, and 10 5 cent losers, trading 10,000 shares (nothing on C) that's a $5k/day living. Try to make that your aim with 100 shares and work it up. But scalping C is not worth your time unless you have a basically free commission structure.
Thank you all for the replies. Illiquid, how did you achieve good timing? Did you watch one stock for days/weeks on end until you had a feel for it or did you look at other things? What are your trading strategies at this point in time? NYOB, if scalping C is not worth my time what do you think would be? I think scalping/day trading is what fits my personality best so I think I want to stick to that. What stocks do you think I should look at? And yes noparole I did get royally fisted on my first day, but I know I learned from it and hopefully on my second day the fisting is a little less.