Day Trading

Intro

Day trading is buying or selling a security on the same day to achieve a financial gain, usually on an exchange. It can be done within a few seconds or over hours.

Types of securities can be shares of stock, futures contracts, option contracts, foreign currency, or crypto currencies; this isn't a complete list, however they're what most day traders focus on.

Wait, should you even day trade?

Day trading is not like other self employed or side job activities: As you lose at day trading, you lose money, and eventually you can't day trade any longer.

False sense of security

Paper trading aka simulated trading (even staring at charts) won't make you better either because it doesn't take into account your emotions which most likely are the problem and you won't ever solve it with fake money.

Paper trade only to get used to the software and executing order types like market vs limit etc.

Over trading doesn't work

Again staring at charts doesn't make you better. Either trade in short sessions, typically right after high volume events, see a forex or economic calendar to know when those are. You could also just trade for 30 to 60 minutes before work, during lunch, or after work.

Just keep in mind that if you're losing money that trying to make back your loses doesn't work at all, no mater how much more time you stare at a screen because at this point you're desperate & angry (even more emotional).

You just need to practice with real money in small amounts, best way to do this is by trading forex or crypto which typically have no account minimums and let you do penny trades or sub penny trades respectively.

Solutions to the above are:

• Bank roll (the money you'll use to day trade)
• Savings (this is to cover your living expenses, if you decide to day trade part time w/ a job then this can be skipped)
• Adhere to a strict money management system (see sections below)
• Trade very small, penny trades with forex and/or crypto and work your way up in trade sizes, more on that later
• Trade after high volume events, use an economic calendar; see the news section below

Note on quitting your job for trading

If you plan on quitting your job, then your bank roll & savings should be huge: Savings should cover 2 years or more of monthly expenses, and your bank roll should be even bigger.

However if your expenses are paid for because you're a dependent, such as living with your parents or you plan keeping your job & trading part time (morning, lunch, after work), then that's even better since your bank roll can be the minimum:

• $25k for stocks
• 5k to 10k for futures
• Around $100 for forex/crypto (or even less, broker dependent)

Emotions

There are psychologists specifically for dealing with day trader emotions. We can't make recommendations here, but you shouldn't pay more than what a regular psychologist charges, and you should stay away from courses, programs, and retreats offered online.

If you plan on getting a couch for your emotions, don't, seek out a licensed psychologist or a licensed social worker. Think of these people as a doctor for your emotions, so don't seek out a cheap solution or someone who isn't licensed to do this type of work.

If this doesn't sound good to you then don't day trade!

Find something else like swing & long term investing, see r/stocks & r/investing. But if you're still like "I hate working and I just want to make money my own way" then see r/entrepreneur.

Are you even good at it?

Paper trading, like we said earlier, this isn't going to get you good at trading, don't waste too much time on this.

Paper trade to get good with the software you're going to use before using real money so you know what each order type, button, etc does.

Start with a small account

Forex is highly recommended to every day trader starting out because leverage is high and most forex brokers require no minimums and let you make penny trades. See r/forex's wiki.

You can also use crypto except leverage isn't very high and is different for different crypto coins, however that's not the case with crypto futures like at BitMEX.

Money management

In a nut shell, you break up your account in slices and each slice is 1 trade. For example, trading with $100 in a forex account, you would split it by 20, so each trade is $5; while that seems low, you have to consider leverage, forex can have around 50x and some futures products such as treasuries can have over 100x leverage.

But the point to all this is to reduce risk. Think to your self, 1 bad trade = 0 money, so if you want to stay in the game you need more money, so just split your account up. Splitting it in 20 slices means you can make 20 trades. Some traders say only use 1% to 2% of your account, that would mean 100 to 50 trades respectively, but it's more since you're using a percentage, so using 1% of your account for trades.. after 50 trades.. you're left with 61% of your account intact.

See below to continue reading about money & risk management more in depth.

Brokers

List of brokers for day trading:

Traditional:

• Oanda - forex broker w/ leverage/margin
• Ampfutures
• Centerpoint Securities
• Capital Market Elite Group (CMEG)
• E-Trade
• Interactive Brokers
• Lightspeed
• Robinhood
• Speedtrader
• TD Ameritrade (Think or Swim aka TOS)
• TradeStation
• TradeZero

Crypto:

• Binance
• BitMEX - futures & high leverage
• Coinbase & Coinbase Pro
• Kraken

What to trade

Forex

Best for beginners since most forex brokers require no capital, you can make penny trades, and leverage is high. Also there are no pattern day trading (PDT) rules to stop you from day trading.

Futures

This can be a more interesting market than forex and stocks since you still have high leverage and no PDT rules, but you need more money, around 5k to 10k cash

Options

Again, low capital required and high leverage, however the knowledge required is extremely high so it will take longer to get started on this. See r/options.

Stocks

You need over $25k cash to trade this or you get hit with PDT restrictions, unless you use a non margin account (cash account) but that comes with it's own restrictions however you can day trade longer, see PDT terms below.

Crypto

No PDT rules, leverage can be super low unless you trade crypto futures, volume can be low depending on which exchange you use; you still have to pay taxes.

Money management, continued

To quote r/forex wiki:

Money management is a form of risk management and is arguably the most important aspect of your trading when it comes to long term survival. You should always enter trades with a stop loss - the distance of the stop allows you to calculate how large of a percent of your account balance will be lost if your trade stops out. You can run a monte carlo simulation to figure out the risk of having a number of trades go against you in a row to drain your account. The general rule is that you should only risk losing 1-4% of your account per trade entered

And links they shared:

• Investopedia's forex management
• A swing trade blog, but the info applies to day trading

But yes it's highly recommend to split your trades, use leverage, and a stop loss + profit taking limit order. You can do this easily with forex since most forex brokers will let you do penny trades.

Positive Expectancy

After you've traded for some time, you should be able to calculate how much money your trading strategy brings, this is called expectancy and your strategy should have a positive expectancy. Even if you have more bad trades than good, the good trades should provide enough profit to overcome the losses.

• daytrading blog on calculating expectancy

Terminology

Borrowing from the Stocks community, their wiki on technical analysis and terminology.

Tools

Type of chart, candle or line chart

Lots of debates on what type of chart you should use, but candle charts show a good amount of info such as the opening price, the closing price, if price went up or down and how far it went (the high & low) for the candle size.

See Stockchart's intro to candles.

Indicators

A lot of day traders use naked charts (no indicators) however most still look at indicators to see how other traders or algos will react. You should be looking at multiple charts of the same security and leave 1 of those charts naked or with very little indicators.

The most useful:

• Volume profile aka volume by price
• Drawing your own support & resistance trendlines
• DOM aka Orderbook - shows you all the limit orders at every price level, this works like an auction + supply & demand, for example if there's a lot of sellers at $35.05 and less buyers at $35.04, then some of those sellers at 35.05 will change their order to meet the low demand below the price before other sellers can do the same. See DOM wiki.
• ATR - Average true range gives a number that tells you how wide price movements are, great for helping set stops and profit taking limits. ATR of 5 means average price movement of 5 ticks for that given timeframe, typically you would have a stop loss of around 2x ATR so in this case it would be 10 tick wide stop. If a stop loss of around 2x ATR is too high for you or for your given strategy, then trade a different security or change your strategy.
• VWAP - Takes the average price and weighs it by volume, basically you want to be short below VWAP and go long above VWAP; near the VWAP line (or price) there can be lots of whipsaw
• Moving averages - This won't predict anything, but other traders react to them, so it's your job to see if price bounces off these lines or not. Standard moving averages are SMA 20, SMA 50, and SMA 200. Don't clutter your chart with this crap!
• RSI - relative strength index, takes the average gain of the stock price divided by the average loss over a number of periods, default 14; starts to reverse when it points down from 70 (sell signal) and reverses agian when it points up from 30 (buy signal)
• MACD - combines momentum & trend indicators; gives off many trade signals including ovebought/sold and divergence, see link here note that the histogram in the center shows how wide the MACD & Signal line are from each other
• Bollinger Bands (BB) - takes the standard deviation of price times 2 (default); in statistics, 95% of all values are within 2 standard deviations. BB is typically used for resistance and support, more info here.
• Ichimoku clouds - Combines even more indicators, good for beginners, see here

Frontends

• Tradingview
• cryptowat.ch
• MT4 - Designed with forex in mind and lets you autotrade using an easy to use code they created for people who don't code
• MT5 - same as mt4 except the code is more object oriented targeting actual programmers

News feeds

Typically your broker provides a news feed with some requiring you to pay for faster/better news data.

News doesn't really affect forex or crypto like it does with stocks, but you should be looking at a forex calendar (see forex calendar and fxtreet as examples).

If you trade futures or forex, the calendars above are essential to knowing when a high volume move is coming.

When to trade

I can't list every single high volume event for every security, so in addition to an economic calendar, you can find out on your own:

Look at a chart for the security you're going to trade and take note of the volume spikes.

First format that chart so you're looking at days aka daily timeframe. Look at a week's or two worth of days and try to find the high volume spike. Then zoom into the 4 hour timeframe and then again with 1 hour and 15 minutes take note of the time and date.

Ask yourself why did that happen, it could be as simple as the US exchange nearing the closing time or when Japan wakes up to trade a specific coin.

Don't take a bet before the event! You want to analyze the results immediately after the event and trade accordingly. Perhaps the event was bad and the security is going to go down from there, maybe it's an over reaction and it'll reverse, take 5 to 15 minutes to see where the security will go, best to have a separate chart that's broken down by 5 minute candles.

Strategies

First off, keep in mind that algo traders write scripts/bots to deal with these situations and to take the other side of the bet, you'll see lots of whipsaw and generally the opposite effect, however there are big traders waiting for these moments as well, there's also a tug of war occurring and no one can say a strategy will always work 100% of the time:

General strategies

• Patterns - Double tops, head & shoulders, and cup & handle are the most watched for, see here for more, don't get too caught up in patterns because they fail often, but you should be looking for an increase of volume when they work & don't work.
• Channels - very much like fading (see below) except you find 2 parallel trend lines that price has been bouncing between, see here
• Breakouts/Breakdowns - while patterns can be attractive, breakouts/breakdowns happen all the time; here's one way to take advantage of them and

Specifically for day trading strategies

• Fading from yesterday - this involves comparing yesterday's high or low with price movements today: If today's price moves up to yesterday's high and reverses, you short; if it reverses off yesterday's low, you buy.

  • This doesn't have to be "yesterday" but the last trading session by a specific country like when Chinese traders trade or US traders.

• Doji breakout - find a high volume doji candle on daily timeframes, you wait for price to breakout of the high or breakdown of the low before entering your trade

• micro patterns - Typically double tops/bottoms and flags, both as small as 1 minute and often can be seen together..

Related communities

• r/thewallstreet
• r/forex
• r/options

Terminology

• PDT - Pattern day trading, wiki provided by the Stocks community on Reddit

Advanced & other wikis (Book Recommendations)

• See here

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Hey guys, I’ve had a few comments on reddit and instagram to explain the ATH (all time high) breakout trades I take on a daily basis and so here it is.

I’m a full time trader and I hope you guys find this helpful.

To explain this in great detail would take hours upon hours however I’ve wrote up a simplified description to make it digestible.

“We do not trade ideas we trade set ups”

As professional traders you should not be trading ideas, you should be trading sets ups. Something that you can measure, replicate, improve upon and learn from. Not random events.

Here’s an example of how a novice traders mind may work:

You see an article pop up about a Tesla car that was on auto pilot and crashed into a stationary car causing injury to both the driver and the passenger. Your instant thoughts are “This could effect Tesla’s stock price” and you put it on your watchlist for the day. Now the issue with this is this the specific event Is not measurable. The way in which the stock reacts will be random and you won’t be able to use the stats for any other trades. Making the event a coin flip and therefore a gamble.

Focus on set ups not ideas. It’s ok to have an idea for the set up but the set up HAS TO BE THERE.

Now lets get straight to it.

What is an all time high breakout?

1. The answer is simple. This is when a stock breaks out into a new ATH.

Why is this such a good set up to take?

1. Because everybody who’s EVER brought the stock is now in the GREEN “no reason to sell” and everybody who’s shorting the stock is now red “May look to cover”

Here’s how it works:

A lot of professional traders, myself included, love the all time high break outs for many reasons. The main being the explosive moves it can often provide. Due to this a lot of day traders, swing traders, investors, funds and algorithms will monitor the market for these potential plays. Meaning they’re often on the buying side. This is why you can see what appears to be a stock doing very little yet the moment it trickles over it’s previous ATH high it can rally for days.

It’s called “buying the breakout”

You see the market is run on mostly Human emotion, we know this but very few understand how that works.

The reason most people lose money in the market is they are untrained and do not have the discipline to handle their own barbaric emotions.

Here’s why that’s important.

For this example we’ll call the company $STONKS it’s been on the market for 3 years and it’s current all time high is $10. Some bad news comes out and the stock gaps down to $8 causing people to panic sell and the stock to drop even further. Over the next 12 months it drops to a low of $5 until finally reclaiming to today at $9.90. It’s been consolidating between $9 and $9.90 for 10 days.

For the past year there has been a lot of people bag holding. Those who brought at the previous all time high have seen their investment drop by 50% and slowly recover. In between this time a lot of people have cut their loses, some have averaged down, new investors have “brought the dip” and we’re now back to where we was a year ago.

Now we have a few things at play here.

1. Those who rode through the entire year, the 50% drop and who haven’t sold now at break even clearly have no intention to sell.

2. Out of those who brought the dip some will have sold and some and still holding onto their shares even though the price has been stagment the past 10 days.

3. For the past 10 days people have been buying consistently and have been paying $9 or above for the stock. Showing a growing interest and price acceptance at these prices.

4. People who shorted the stock are now either at break even or at a loss.

5. Anybody new who wants to purchase some shares has currently got to pay all time high prices.

The longer we consolidate at these price the more powerful the move can become, why you ask?

Because it has more chance of the float being rotated. Understand that the first time $STONKS went up to $10 1 year ago the average price paid by an investor may have been $3 which meant a lot of profit taking occurred. When the bad news hit a lot of those investors jumped ship. Causing more supply than demand and therefore the price to drop.

Fast forward to today and the longer it consolidates above $9 the high the AVG price held will be. When this happens the buyers are literally sitting on basically no loss nor no gain giving them no reason to sell.

For those unaware, if you short a stock the only way to get out for a loss is to cover your position. This in turn means “buying the stock”. Creating more buying pressure. Short positions will often risk in this scenario the all time high. Meaning if it breaks they start to cover. If they start to cover it increases buying pressure and with buying pressure increasing the stock moves up (extremely simple explanation).

So we as traders recognise the stock is setting up for an ATH breakout and here’s what we do.

We decide we want to risk $2,000 in the stock.

We buy $500 worth at 9.20 known as a starter position and we wait.

A week goes by and it’s still chopping between this range. A press release then comes out (a bullish catalyst). The market opens are $STONKS see’s a huge 15 minute candle at open. The largest amount of volume it’s seen in months. On that volume it breaks $10 and instantly jumps to $10.50.

We managed to get our other $1,500 in at $10.20 bringing our average to roughly $9.90 a share. We move our stop loss to below the previous ATH with some breathing room AKA $9.50/share.

Everybody who now has shares in this stock prior to today is in the green, they’re estactic. Those who held through the entire past year and refused to sell are now mentioning how they’re in profit on an investment they made to work colleagues.

Short positions are now aware there’s no resistance and start covering “buying shares”. FOMO buyers who are “trading the news” (not a set up ;) ) are now buying in. Professional swing traders are buying the break out, day traders are buying the opening drive. Everybody is buying..

The stock closes at $12 marking a 25% daily gain. Barrons, CNBC, MSN all post above how $STONKS rallied into ATH due to X,Y,Z

The following morning the stock gaps up. People are hyped, pre market goes wild and opens at $16.

We instantly sell half…

The stock is extremely extended as new investors flurry in, we sell them some more. There’s now 25% left of our original investment.

We move our stop loss under PM support and go to focus on the next set up. The same set up. Something we can measure. Something we take day in day out.

If the stock goes to 20 then we don’t get annoyed we could have missed out on further profits as it wasn’t our trade.

The stock taps 20, massive selling occurs and settles around 14. Where it stays for months, consolidationg. Meanwhile, we’re just waiting for it to once again set up.

So how do I find these trades?

I use trading view, I create a list of sectors such as EVs, Solar, Tech, AI etc etc and I scan through each day. Literally just flick through. Is the stock near it’s ATH? If not, I go to the next and the next.

My indicators are as follows.

Volume Profile, RSI (for the daily only)

That’s it.

If you master just this single set up you can make money consistently. Why? Because it’s measurable, you can improve upon it. You can learn from each event but most importantly you have a set plan where the market is in your favour for the outcome to work. Never under estimate human emotion.

I post all my trades on Instagram at the moment but I’ll look into posting my watchlist here too if it’ll help you guys.

Feel free to ask questions.

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I'm not going to suggest what you should do to learn because I'm sure a lot of other's will.

Instead I hope you take my advice on what NOT to do. I've seen waaayyy too many people on here blow up their accounts and generally get frustrated and quit because they aren't patient and deliberate.

#1 DO NOT trade options right now. In fact, DO NOT trade options for a good long while until you are good and confident in yourself as a trader. Options may give you leverage but they are also the #1 way most new traders blow up their accounts. There is a lot to factor in with options people telling you it's the easy way to take a little account and get rich are lying.

#2 DO NOT try and get rich quick. Don't try and hit home runs. Don't risk too much in a single trade. Limiting your risk and making a little bit here and a little bit there is much more sustainable than swinging for the fences.

#3 DO NOT trade any significant amount of money in penny stocks at first (I barely touch them at all). Literally any stock below $10 can (and often will) swing by large percentages throughout a trading day. They can also be less liquid making it slower to exit a position when you need.

#4 DO NOT go overboard with indicators and patterns and stuff. When you are taking in too many data points you can rationalize to yourself that you see a viable entry point at almost any minute of the day. Find a couple that you are comfortable with and learn to really see what they are saying. I only use 3-4 indicators/metrics total for 90% of my trades.

#5 DO NOT assume it can't happen to you. Directions can AND WILL change. Ask yourself before getting in how much you are willing to risk on this trade. Ride that shit up and cash out when you are ready but don't be afraid to take a small loss (whatever is acceptable to you) if you are wrong. It's much much easier to rebound from a relatively small loss and shake it off than it is to try come back from a huge loss that happened while you were hoping for the stock to turn around. Set a floor for your trade and mean it.

#6 DO NOT revenge trade. This is where you hastily jump into another trade to try and make up for a loss. It's happened to all of us at some time but it can be dangerous. Take a deep breath and DO NOT let revenge or redemption motivate your next decision. The market doesn't give a shit how the last trade went and it can make a bad situation worse if you start trading like a desperate gambler when you take a loss. Trust me. If you are hasty and trading on emotion, you will wish you just had your initial loss because that's a recipe for making it much worse.

#7 Finally, DO NOT think that all you have to do is find the perfect strategy or know all the right data. Successful trading is almost about understanding yourself more than the stock. No strategy is a sure thing. NO amount of data will make the markets behave rationally in a given day. Success is largely about limiting risk, being consistent, and not allowing yourself to rationalize a bad decision.

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Okay this is coming up a lot and every time someone answers it’s bad so I’m going to try you need to learn whatever skills or knowledge you need to make your strategy profitable. Period. All the things people talk about work if you master them. Just start with something simple and keep tweaking it and adding new concepts until you have enough that you feel satisfied.

So what does that look like? You could be profitable just longing support and shorting resistance. One trader i follow turned $3000 into 4.5 million in under 2 years because he was really good at doing that. You could just watch candlestick patterns, another guy I follow has two of the leaderboard accounts on the site and that’s basically all he does. Again, it’s hard though and you have to be really good at spotting all the nuances quickly. The dude who taught me to trade could make 300%-1000% per day annoyingly consistently by just trading price action and a couple indicators. That I will suggest you not attempt until you have something else to fall back on though as it’s incredibly difficult and requires you master your emotions even more than most strats.

I personally use a combination of all three of these things with a heavier reliance on indicators. People say they aren’t reliable but those people are morons. It’s like any other strategy, if you just buy when the RSI on the 5 minute is oversold without looking at the context or comparing everything else you’re going to get rekt just like if you buy automatically every time it looks like the 1 hour chart is making a bull flag.

In conclusion, just find A strategy and master it until you can make money from it. While you are doing that you can then pick up other things, as you’ll be spending a lot of time staring at charts and green/red numbers anyway

—-Edit—-since someone thought I was full of shit, here is the bitmex leaderboard by percent. Some people are that good https://imgur.com/a/oLrQC55

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As far as YouTubers go I like TheChartGuys. You can learn a lot just by following along with the daily market overview videos they put out.

TheStocksChannel is also pretty good for the same thing and it's interesting to compare the analysis of each.

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I posted a bit about my own journey learning how to trade here.

As for a learning path:

1. Learn all of the basic terminology and strategies.

• What are candlestick charts?

• What are time frames?

• What are popular indicators and how are they used (Volume, RSI, EMAs, VWAP, etc)

• What are chart patterns and how do I identify and trade them?

• What is a stop loss?

• How do I calculate R:R?

• How do I draw trend lines?

• What is support/resitance?

• What is the difference between trend line support and price level support?

1. Find a broker that works for your circumstances

• What country do you live in?

• What products do you want to day trade? Stocks, futures, options, forex?

• Does fast order routing matter to you? Aka, stylistically do you want to do 10 second scalps or trades that last 5 minutes+

• Is my broker subject to FINRA regulations and thus the PDT rule?

• Do I want to paper trade?

• Do I want to do backtesting?

1. Broker Setup

• Setup your charts how you want them to be (color scheme, indicators, watch lists, etc)

• Do some practice trades (paper or small positions) to get used to your broker's interface

1. Learn how to setup a scanner to find good stocks to trade

• Stay away from penny stocks

• Once you find a ticker you like add it to your watchlist. Good tickers are often tradeable for several weeks/months.

1. Find a GOOD community to join (skipable)

• You can trade on your own but learning will be much easier if you can find some experienced traders to answer your questions and review your trades

• Generally good communities are paywalled but there are some decent free ones. Ask around and stay away from "Guru" types and anyone who isn't willing to work 1-on-1 with you.

• Bonus points if the person/staff running the community are willing to regularly livestream their trading with commentary

1. Practice

• Spend a few months paper trading or using extremely small positions

• Make a point to take it seriously. Trade every day and treat it as if you were trading with meaningful dollar amounts.

• Learn how to quickly calculate R:R and appropriate share size relative to where you want your stop loss

• Practice scaling into and out of positions

1. Review your trades

• Keep a detailed trading journal (google what this entails) or pay for a stat/journaling service

• Figure out what is working for you and where you are losing money. I'd recommend getting a more experienced trader to help you out with this. What you think you are doing right/wrong might not be the same as what they think.

1. Realize you suck at trading and that learning takes time

• Some people can pick up trading in a few months and for others it takes years. It depends heavily on the trader's personality, work ethic, their style of trading, and how quickly they can adapt to changing market conditions. Don't be afraid to ask for help if things are not going well. Trading is a zero sum game and you are competing against algos, prop firms, and traders with decades of experience. You don't need to be the best but if you're not beating the market then trading is a waste of your time.

• From what I've seen the biggest factor separating successful traders from those who fail is good risk management, the ability to not deviate from their strategy, and to stick with it/keep learning. Good traders treat trading as a job and don't let emotions dictate their decisions.

1. Start learning more advanced strategies and tweaking what works for you

• Learn about market and sector correlations

• Learn how different time frames interact and how you can use that information to predict what the most likely scenario is

• Learn how different indicators interact and now how they behave differently on different tickers

• Learn about more specialized indicators such as fib retracements, fib extensions, standard deviation channels, TDSequential, Volume Profile, Pivots, Elliot Wave analysis

• Start learning to recognize good trading conditions and poor trading conditions. There are times where you want to be aggressive as a trader and there are times where you are better off sitting on your hands and waiting for tightening ranges to break

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Feel free to shoot me a PM if you have questions about any of the above or would like specific points explained. Good luck! :)

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For me I found a trading community with a lot of experienced/profitable members and went through the following progression:

1. I relentlessly pestered the more experienced traders (usually the moderators) in the group with questions about why they entered/exited when they posted their trades. The goal being to find out what was it specifically that was their go signal to get in or out. I also spent a ton of time watching videos on different trading concepts and paid for a few of the cheaper courses out there.

2. The guy who runs the community would occasionally call out trades he was making while livestreaming. I'd copy the trades he made and it let me comfortably get experience playing different setups I knew were "valid". I could focus more on adjusting my position (scaling in/out) and just getting comfortable risking money rather than worrying about what to play and if it was even a good setup.

To be good at trading you have to learn to not think about your account balance as money and instead think of it more like a pile of chips in poker. For me looking at the percentages helped. I had to learn to realize that loosing or being down $100 while a decent amount of money, is actually just a fraction of a percent of my account and is negligible on a day to day basis.

3) After a while finding setups on my own came naturally from seeing what tickers people were trading every day and why. You start to recognize the same patterns playing out over and over again. I was then able to start applying what I learned to different tickers/sectors.

4) I had a few traders who I became friends with and we would chat regularly throughout the morning. It was nice to have people to bounce trade ideas off of or get advice if I found myself in a tricky spot. My trades during this period were a mix of my own plays as well as copying the setups other traders posted about if I agreed with them. I was at the point where I felt confident enough in my TA knowledge to know the difference between a "good" setup and one that was just mediocre.

5) I started modifying setups traders would post or even switch the ticker to a different one in the same sector after realizing how important correlations were. Putting SPY, QQQ, XLF, and XLV on a quad chart on 1 monitor and trying to always have the overall market moving in the direction of the trade I was going for on an individual ticker helped my win rate a lot.

6) I joined a group of traders from that same community that were looking to do conference calls on a daily basis. We usually meet up 30-60 minutes before the open to discuss the setups we are looking at and to go over trades we made the day before. We then break for 15 minutes and then resume the call at the open. We all tend to watch slightly different tickers/sectors and will call out setups we think are good.

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Just pick a stock, watch it, and try to learn its personality; Once you think you have a feel for things make a small position and see if you can make money off of it. Just do 10 shares at a time, and focus on your green exit. Your brokers hours, personality, personal obligations all play in to your journey as a trader. 3 rules to live by 1)Be nimble 2)If you are thinking of screenshotting or showing off your unrealized gains, SELL 3)Trades move against even the best traders with, the best TA. Learn to cut and run

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90% reading 10% practice. you only need a few decisions a year. lilke today. i have invested my money for 2019. it now only depends whether people sell me their shares of stocks. so over the next few days, i'll know. =) then depending on the outcome id either be selling when it appreciates 50% or i'd be waiting for next 3 years.

my short cut is simply 2 x mc/(niat x bv) <=12 once it reaches 12, i stop adding money and wait for the appreciation.

as long as the businesses i chose is less than this i can dca yearly. but when it reaches 12. i stop buying. currently i have 4 good businesses held.