I believe this is called scalping. The danger is a big move against you that wipes out a week of profits in a single day.
Yep, my finger was always hovering over the sell(buy) hot key, so that I could quickly get out of the position if the direction changed. However, I see your point; a really big move could do me in. Actually, I thought scalping involved trading a relatively "silent" stock. NVDA was anything but silent. There was a general trend down. I was trading the bumps on the way down. If I had short sold and held, I would have been kicked out by the loss limits we have as "student" traders.
Lol I know. Today, in his journal, he lost 30% of his starting capital in one day. I checked out that link to his Predictor Discretionary ETF and it says the chance of a 30% loss is 0.0%....oddly enough he managed to somehow pull that 30% loss on day 2 of his journal. He can't be more than 16 or 17 years old. To me he tries to sound like an extremely successful trader with 10+ years under his belt. Little does he know that overconfidence has been the reason for the downfall of many of aspiring traders. I know that you trade actively d08, what do you think about the idea of trading with disregard for managing the downside? I'm certain I know the answer, but I'm only asking to educate the bastard child of Maximus Decimus Meridius -- young Lucias. http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=215790
lol poor Lucias. Everyone thinks they are god's gift to trading when they enter. Good luck scalping, I hope you don't have to pay rent...
ksmetana, it is one of many skills that I must acquire on my road to success. Only scalping won't be enough, but there will be situations where it is useful. I need a set of skills, not just one, so that I can adjust. Frankly, I find even an intraday buy and hold impossible in these volatile markets. I too quickly hit my loss limit. Recall, that I am stopped out for the day if I lose $50.
Currently, I make use of the free charting website www.freestockcharts.com. It provides almost real time data within a couple of seconds of accuracy. If I were to make use of "basket" orders, multiple stocks traded simultaneously, following each stock individually, would, to say the least, be a real challenge. Does software exist that would take each stock's chart and adds them all together as a single chart? Ideally, I would like to be able to analyse the basket as a whole rather than each individual stock. This would give me the exposure I need rather than risking all of the $9900 on one stock. I could purchase 2000 shares of a group of stocks priced between $4 and $5, thus distributing the risk over a group of stocks. Each tick then would be a change of $20. At this rate scalping would become much more significant.
What platform do you use? You should be able to add multiple stocks on one chart no problem, it will be a line chart if you do. If google finance can do it, your platform should be able to I use Blackwood and it has that feature
Does google do an aggregate chart? I can only find the option to do a comparative chart. Maybe I haven't made myself clear. Consider 4 stocks with the following prices: $5.20, $4.80, $3.20, $3.90. I want the graph to show the sum: $5.20 + $4.80 + $3.20 + $3.90 = $17.10. In other words, I want the basket to be treated like an individual stock much like an ETF. Having said that, comparative is useful too, to find correlations. The trading platform being used is proprietary software and the charting application has been declared poor. Admittedly, I haven't even tried it. That's why I use freestockcharts.com. This type of scalping together with the ECN credits that I described in my other post would, in theory, create a nice profit. Thanks.
I'm still trying to find my way to success. I trade mainly the forex market and the oil+metal market(gold&silver) this are my expertise.You can see some of my results in the link below: http://www.dukascopy.com/tradercontest/?action=blog&trader=WallStreet_Money Althought is just a demo competition results they simulate some of my live trades but using other risk management. Anyway you need to be very competitive when in comes to competitons and you need to adapt to the rules of the contest in order to score points and to gain more rank.