Other than experience, is there a way to increase my skills at timing the trades for day trading? I'm about 6 months in to my very unprofitable trading career and I keep executing the same issue... I'm picking the right stocks and buying, they end up correcting or reacting and hitting my stop loss at 3% and than shooting up so i "usually" miss out on the uptrend. is there any way to correct this? It happened twice to me today on ENPH and AMD
%% Yes VT23; but one of the best ways is enter in the day+ let the profits ride. Like profits ride, for weeks /+ ?? Sure; but that profit is not as much fun as as being an action addict. AMD is a good pick @ least it has been; up 82% YTD. The good news is you are like me, when i started-you proved the markets are NOT random.WE WERE much , much worse than random. IBD founder uses $8 stop for a $24 profit as a guide.Sharp shooters maybe get by with less than 3% ; but for me to make a profit, risk $8 to make $24 is a good guide for AMD also. I do more stuff like QQQ.......................................... It worked even better when AMD was $8.00 but try NOT to risk 100%[$8] to make $ 24,
Buy the corrections? Speaking of timing - what time of day are you trading? No easy fixes, so whatever advice you get is useless.
My assessment of your situation is that you are not a good fit for day trading and should just buy an index fund and long term invest. I based my assessment on your question which says quite about about you - most of it negative: Other than experience? How do you expect to learn except from researching and experimenting, and gaining experience from those efforts? What you're really asking for is some type of quickly learned "gimmick" that will magically unlock the "timing code" and give you great entries and exits. It shows you don't respect the difficulty behind day trading, and think it's something that can be gained without much effort. You must not have done any research into it at all since then you would see the high failure rates of those who attempt this profession. It can take many years to master day trading, if at all. And yet you seem surprised that you're not immediately successful after a mere 6 months. I bet you're never practiced on a trading sim account and just jumped right into it with your own money. Do you have a trading plan for the best time to enter, what your profit targets should be, and the best place to put your stops? Have you tested your plan on a sim before using a real account? Are you taking lots of notes of what parts of the trade you got right or wrong, and what the possible solutions might be? Does it sound like day trading takes a lot of effort and time to master? That's because it does. And if you were so fortunate after putting in those hard years of trial and error until you crafted your own working trading plan- would you be willing to just share your plan with someone looking for shortcuts that could jeopardize your plan from working in the future? Likely not, which is why you shouldn't expect anyone who has put the time in to just hand you information that you likely wouldn't understand anyway because it's not a "gimmick" but based on knowledge of price action behavior that you can only get by experience over time. Professional day trading is one of the hardest careers you can choose. Unless you have someone in your family that is a successful day trader, you are going to have to mostly figure it out on your own, which as I said could take years and even then many fail. There are no short cuts. You really should take the time to count the costs and take a serious assessment if you want to proceed.
Difficult to answer your question. Not enough data. Could you give us a step by step breakdown of a typical trade? As already posted, a chart would be great. Are you day trading, or swing trading? If you are day trading, it sounds like you are making your entry at exactly the worst point in time. My preset stop is only 1% down and I usually immediately move it up to just under a presumed level of support. Do you think you might be waiting too long for confirmation of a price increase? Or jumping the gun and entering without confirmation? What is your strategy, and especially your entry trigger? Are you watching volume, as well as price? Price action alone can be misleading if you do not also consider volume. If you take just a small portion of what you will probably lose tomorrow, and spend it on a few books, and watch a few dozen youtubes, you might come away with a better understanding of things. Did you spend at least a couple of weeks paper trading, before you went live? If so, how did you do?
You may be making (wrong) assumptions, which by itself is a problem. You’ve stated that your problem is timing, but what if it’s not? And later you’ve actually described the problem as your timing being right but stops being a problem. So your logic may be wrong and you are not seeing things you’re describing. This (your own logic) can make trading very difficult for you.
I was not in this trade - but I take these kind of trades often. Just for the fun of it, I took a look at AMD. Of course it is always easy with hindsight - but this is the simplified recipe I use for these type of trades. Looking for two impulse moves up & maybe a third if the momentum had not of faded out on the 2nd leg up. Two entries (Magenta arrows), stops would be just below these bar lows.
Your the perfect person I'm looking for! keep telling me how hard it is and show me! Im not looking for gimmicks or hot stocks, I'm looking to fix my trading techniques! I actually enjoy the strategy behind it but when you have no help or family and your trying to raise a 3 year old, all I have is books I buy online, books borrowed from the public library and trading forums like this to find my answer! I use the think or swim platform to test my hypothesis before I enter any trade and have been right with my stocks but im not holding on long enough and i dont know if its a psychological barrier or technical issue Im having! but regardless of how much "work" it takes! Ill make it happen, thanks for the advice