Day Trading

Trading For A Living – Fool’s Paradise Or A Real Possibility?   by Peter Skonctuedt

To be able to do trading for a living is a dream of countless part-time traders. One only has to look at the numerous seminars, training sessions and trading bush camps these traders attend to understand how intensely they want to do this. The lifestyle of a full-time trader looks so perfect: you never have to leave your desk, never have to face an angry boss. You can take leave whenever you want. You determine your own salary.

It doesn’t have to stay a dream forever. There are a couple of things you need to keep in mind before you will ever be a successful full-time trader though.

The very first thing you have to understand right from the start is that you will not be trading against other traders. Neither will you be trading against the market. You will be trading against yourself Your own strengths and weaknesses will go with you into trading and determine whether you are successful or not.

What exactly does that mean? It means that you can study all the rules, you can intellectually know the right thing to do in every possible set of circumstances. But if you have a tendency to hang on to losing trades in the hope that they will turn around, you will lose money time and again.

The same is true if you do not develop the discipline to let a winning trade ride – to allow it to reach its full potential and make some serious money. Selling winning trades the moment they have made a little money and staying in losing trades forever are the two major causes of failure for newbie traders.

You second important step will be to decide what type of trader you want to be. A day trader, a swing trader or a longer term trader. Day-trading is extremely alluring. You can start with little money, and you can sometimes make a lot of profit in one day. Statistically it is however much more difficult to predict the market movement for a share or a currency during the next 8 hours than to predict it for the next year.

You will also have to decide which market instruments you will be trading in: commodities, shares or currencies. Each one of them will require a different skill set and different tools. They also require a slightly different approach to trading. With share trading you must get intimate with the financial statements of the companies you want to trade in. You have to know the market for their products or services. With currency trading and commodities you have to study the underlying factors causing price movements in these instruments. Things like droughts, surpluses, inflation and interest rates.

The right tools are of course very important as well. To start off with you need knowledge. You need to get familiar with reading financial statements and analysing charts. You need to understand technical indicators, how to use them and how to interpret movements in these indicators

Furthermore you need to register with a company that will provide you with the latest prices for the instruments you want to trade in. Many free services provide delayed prices – which is good enough if you trade in a longer time frame. If you want to get involved in day trading, you absolutely have to make sure you get live prices though.

Trading for a living can be a reality sooner than you think. Approach this in a systematic way. Start with yourself, get yourself ready, and then get the right technical tools.

About the Author

Tired of scraping by at your day job? Why not get into the stock market and make some money the easy way… with the guidance of artificial intelligence! More info about trading for a living… Also check the best stock picking software.

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