I'm trying to get a set routine down that I follow to start every trading day. It goes something like this: 9:00 PM Check Briefing.com for late stock news and Island.com to see the effect of the news on after hours trading. Update Support and Resistance points for stocks in my basket. 5:30 AM Check futures prices CNBC Again Check Briefing.com and Island.com as above. 5:45 AM Login to trading on computer 1 and bring up my charts etc. Login to computer 2 and bring up IB and Chat room. Check and chart futures. 6:00 AM Finalize my plan for the open. Bring up charts of stocks of interest in the pre-open. Check and chart futures. 6:15 AM Check CNBC for fun... finish coffee... check futures. Monitor calls in the Chat room... check out interesting stocks. 6:35 AM Scan for market movers... up and down. It's work in progress. How does my routine compare to anyone else's reading this? Do you have suggestions? I want to make Daytrading my business and plan on treating just like any other business. Thanks for comparisons and suggestions for improvement!
El Cazador, Newbie here... I appreciate your post as I am becoming a strong believer that following a pre-market routine can be critical to our (day)trading success. And I have not as yet established one. But it is my next step towards becoming a serious trader. Several times this past week my lack of preparation kept me out of good trades. I need to develope the discipline to do my post and pre-market homework. Of course part of this is learning what analysis is effective. Thank you for presenting a model that I can adopt. Best wishes to you. From the times you wrote down you must be on the West coast, as am I. Wouldn't it be sweet to have until 0930 to focus on pre-market?! Day trading in Hawaii must be tough!
I'm a new trader and live on the west coast as well. I've been at it full time now for about three months. Lately I've been getting up at about 10:00pm PDT. The first thing I do is check the forums to read what others have to say, it gets my motor running. These guys at Elite are really great. Their serious commitment to daytrading helps me focus. The next thing I do is to go over my trades (if any) from the previous day. I list them for future reference and then critique them in a log. That way I can ferret out my mistakes and study the log in the future so that I don't forget where I went wrong in the past. For instance, I made a stupid mistake the other day. I entered a trade where the spread was greater than my stop-loss. In other words, the minute I executed the trade I was immediately stopped out. Boy was that stupid! I'll never do that again. I made a note of that in my log. At about 1:00am I'll start studying the markets. After that I'll start looking for and analyzing specific stocks to keep an eye on when the market opens. The last thing I do is to develop and print out what I call my battle plan for he day. It reminds me what to look for as the market progresses, what to do in certain cicumstances, what to do in case of emergency (a stock tanks or my computer goes down). I go over my trading log and battle plan about an hour before the market opens at 6:30 PDT. All this helps me focus on what I want out of the market that day. Hope this helps. Good trading. Rigel