I would suggest not buying stocks then.I don't buy a stock unless I think it would be worth holding for years. Even if you're right about the long terms prospects of a business, it can take a long time for the market to come around to your point of view. On short timescales the price of a stock can be driven by a zillion different factors. I try to protect myself from that by buying real businesses that would be worth holding rather than hyper speculative high p/e crap. Plus you have the short term vs long term capital gains issue.
He didn't say he was buying stocks, he said he is trying to day-trade them. ANY instrument in any asset class can be traded, so long as it moves. It's just a matter of knowing the "personality" of the instrument in question. In futures, energies trade very differently intraday. And even the energies themselves have differences between them, like the differences between NG, RB and CL. NG and RB come from CL, but all three behave independently of one another. I'm sure it's the same between a tech cohort, like MSFT, GOOGL and NVDA, even outside of earnings season.
It’s stocks. I should have clarified I'm actually more swing trading. Knocking them out in a day would be great but I have a regular job that occupies my time. I like to have them knocked out in a few days and that usually works but many go over a week.
Yet you said "My personality does not allow me to invest over years time. I don’t have that kind of patience. I want to get a return of some kind every few days. So day-trading I guess." I take it you mean that you don't like the roller coaster ride that buy and hold tends to give you. You need a strategy that takes you out of a position when the trend changes. No sense selling a stock that is making gains every week. Instead of letting the market prove you wrong, make the market prove you right.
If I can add a counter point to the general feedback, it's that whatever decision you make will entail a new decision. Trading is a perpetual loop of unenviable decisions. A trailing stop loss provides the opportunity to rationally decide when to sell, as opposed to an emotional decision that most often leads to losing more. But you also face the risk of seeing your stop loss triggered and the price reverse seconds later. The art of setting trailing stop losses is one I haven't mastered, that's for sure!
There's your emotion at play. Is that a risk you can control? If it's out of your control, learn to live with it. Do you worry about all the stocks you don't own that are making huge gains. I don't. What I did do was hold on to a stock that had huge gains until it was a loser. But only once.
The trades I hold as more memorable are those I exited too early and watched climb another 20% without me.
Right but the stocks I like to trade move in pretty specific patterns over a few days time one way or another. While I will look at a stocks 1 year chart to get an idea of its general direction, that is not as important to me as it’s consistency in its ups and downs over the last couple months and the level that it swings up or down. If the stock has a relatively shallow up and down pattern, I am not interested in it. The longer term on it I pay more attention to if I have one out of its norm when looking for clues as to why it’s out of its norm. My stocks gains over a period of weeks have no value to me. It’s what it did within those weeks (no matter the longer term direction) that I am interested in to determine if it’s going to be on my radar.
As an example, this is nearly the perfect stock to me for trading (ironically it’s the one that pissed me off bad enough to whine about in this thread). It’s what it did at the end of this chart that got me. Now that a few days has gone by and I’m getting over it, I now know that my problem was I needed to get out of it way sooner than I did. That lowest point is where I foolishly got out of it. Notice that it has never been this low anywhere else in the chart. It was very much out of its norm. Still don’t know the reason and fact is, the reason is not important.
There must be a reason for the price to have dropped like that...earnings, weather, lawsuit, competition... It's important to research and look at the bigger picture.