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Agreed. I started off in the markets trading during work hours and at the beginning it was very difficult to get any real work done. Not to mention trading is a difficult task to perform profitably when you are only "half" paying attention or trading with your cursor over the minimize button tucked away in the corner of your office with the computer screen tilted away from anyone that walks bye. Yup, i've been there. Best if you have time to separate the two, or at least trade SIM or TINY position size
Hi..what I found as a practice...is too stay in the markets till around 8.30am PST. Have all positions closed max 9.30pst. I trade ES.
Only positions running are equities or ETFs where I typically hold for days to weeks...but do not need to watch any gyrations since I buy when they are hammered.
This way work is all ears actually after 8.30am...w/o having to think what market is doing.
But it is even harder to do your day job when the trading itch is all over you, biting, inviting and calling you...
I would say that doing the hardest thing pays in trading.
The "hardest" thing to do in this case is to do your day job smartly and trade in your spare time. Define boundaries.
Give your employer a worth that more than compensates him for paying you.
Believe me, your trading will be done within the confines of the proper and rightful minutes you can afford towards it rather than the slinking underhanded hours you devote to it on the sly.
This is not stern head-mistress advice and nor is it superstitious pseudo-psychology.
Once you know why you are trading and you dare to come out of cocoons that bind you then cheating falls away like unwanted skin when your wounds heal.
I've said it many times to many people, and I'm going to say it again. The BEST money I've spent on my trading journey is an Elite Membership here at big mike's. I've learned so so much through the elite webinars. This is one of the very few things I've spent money on in my trading journey, and would had paid much more for it.
Play simulators first. Play them for MONTHS before thinking about putting real money into the market.
Establish criteria for stock selection and stick with them.
You can't day trade without giving it your FULL attention between the time you buy and the time you sell unless
you set up some automatic functions like a trailing stop. Don't try to actively trade if you can't give it your full attention.
Day trading is WORSE than gambling because gambling is all about probabilities. Trading is all about trying to outthink
everybody else in the market. It's predictive mob psychology at its absolute worst. And when you add in the fact that
about 3/4 of the market trading volume is automated trading algorithms warring with each other, you can understand
that it's really a pretty scary thing to do.
Don't invest much. Don't ask for much, either. And don't go for high risk/high reward trades because more often than
not, you WILL lose your shirt.
I'm quite content to pull a mere 2 percent profit out of a day's trading. That's enough to slowly build my stake.
When/if my stake gets large enough, then I can comfortably accept even more modest percentages.
If I could put a million dollars in the market every day I trade, I would be HAPPY to pull just 1/10th of 1 percent profit,
as that would be a thousand dollars.
Never panic. Define your exit strategy BEFORE you buy and know exactly when to sell if things go in the wrong direction. Limits and stop losses are your friend, in my opinion.
Perhaps the best advice of all is to learn about market fundamentals and technical indicators. Some people think a day trader doesn't need to know or care about fundamentals but I beg to differ. You would not want to be caught trading
in a company that's so unstable due to factors you COULD have found out about before it crashes and takes your money with it. And learning the technical charting is VERY helpful to predicting where the price is most likely to go. It's rare for a stock to go completely against the technical indicators. Oh, there will be some deviations, of course, but those indicators are popular and frequently used for the simple reason that they work more often than not.
Losses are how we learn, don't worry to much, do some sim trading, work out what went wrong and fix it, repeat this process about 1000x's and hey presto with several years of hard full time trading your rich beyond your wildest dreams, or driven completely mad
It sounds like you are thinly capitalized and I would avoid futures. In order to keep risk low, your stops will need to be so tight that you will be chopped to death. There is no real point to sim trading - you need to experience your emotions with real money. There is a big difference between shadow-boxing and a real match.
The total daily range for FB on the 24th July was only 2.91%. What exactly did you trade that gave you so much leverage? Also, why do you feel the need to use so much leverage?
You have a choice to make, namely you could now either go for the balls-to-the-wall approach or the slow-and-steady approach. Balls-to-the-wall would entail trying to learn to day-trade, while risking your job and hoping you make it big. Odds of success are low and odds of failure are high. If you are lucky, you might strike it very rich, but the odds are extremely low.
The slow-and-steady approach would entail reading those two books I mentioned as a starting point, reducing leverage, slowly feeling out your emotional thresholds and making peace with the fact that the road to riches may take longer than you would like. With this approach, your odds of failure are much lower, and you will be able to stay in the game longer. Who knows, maybe you can stay in the game long enough to make decent money.
I wasted 8 years trying to strike it rich with the highly-leveraged approach and am achieving much better results with the slow-and-steady method. Only lost about $2k during that period, but it caused me to miss out on a host of better opportunities. It is amazing how much your money can grow when you don't need to continuously dig yourself out of the hole you just created.
On another note, if you were uncomfortable with your leverage (got scared and exited), it means you are trading above your emotional threshold. If you insist on doing that, you will sabotage your own results and blow up sooner or later. Bruce Kovner's suggestion in Market Wizards was to trade half the size you think you should be trading. I would suggest even less.
People tracking their stocks are common throughout the day. often I would have to do desktop workstation maintenance at a former it job. Most people over 30 had some stock ticker app whether hidden in a folder, or hiding behind some other icon, or a plugin to their browser. Unless there was a virus reported I usually left it alone. It was amusing to know most every other neighbor is a closet retail trader of some kind. i mean with wages so seriously deflated for most within the last 20 years and the offshoring of tens of millions of jobs overseas. Of course if I were an "understanding" employer, I would only expect people to check their stocks during break or lunch. At no time during work hours should they be using a trading platform instead of work tasks.
Hi wrx1, I believe you need to start reading up. Al Brook's video course was suggested. That's a good place to start for learning price action for daytrading. Since you are in the Eastern time zone, you may be only able to trade the EUR/USD forex or 6E in very early morning hours for daytrading. After 5pm EST pretty much only the 6J, 6Z, 6A moves, and they don't move all that much these days, but at least you could sim trade them. You can get a sim account at MBT trading and try out their MT4 platform in sim mode. (for forex: JPY/USD, NZD/USD, AUD/USD, etc.)
If you would just like to look for free stuff for now, there is plenty of stuff on the web and here on nexusfi.com (formerly BMT). Of course one has to sift through all the spam ad muck these days. Here's a list of articles , videos and posts:
1. We accumulate information--buying books, going to seminars and researching.
2. We begin to trade with our 'new' knowledge.
3. We consistently 'donate' and then realize we may need more knowledge or information.
4. …
Don't forget to define your personal style of trading. Day Trading might not be for you, but maybe Swing Trading would suit your situation better, and you could watch your stocks while hiding from the boss during your day job.
Not that I would know how to hide from my bosses while I checked my stocks or anything....