What is Day Trading? - The Basics

Day trading is the practice of buying and selling financial instruments, such as stocks, stock options, currencies, and futures contracts, within the same day such that your positions are usually closed before the end of the day.

Day trading used to be the sole realm of professional investors. In fact, many day traders work for banks or investment firms. Advances in technology and the Internet, however, have allowed even amateur traders to day trading.

Day traders often borrow money to trade. This leveraging allows for a high potential rate of return and large profits. Some day traders earn millions of dollars a year. However, day trading can also be extremely risky. Without the proper skills and tools, day traders can just as easily and quickly lose money.

Although collectively called day trading, there are several different styles of day trading. Some trading styles include:

Momentum Trading

Momentum trading is a strategy in which one believes that stocks, or other financial instruments, move with a momentum or trend. Thus, stocks that have been rising are assumed to continue to rise. Likewise, stocks that are falling will continue to fall. A momentum trader thus buys stocks that are rising and short sells ones that are falling.

Contrarian Trading

Contrarian Trading sharply contrasts momentum trading. Contrarian traders believe that stocks that have been rising will reverse and fall. The contrarian trader buys stocks that have been falling and short sells stocks that have been rising.

Range Trading

Day traders who range trade look for stocks that have been consistently trading within a specific range. These stocks rise after hitting a "support" price and fall after hitting a "resistance" price. A range trader therefore buys stocks that are near the support price and short-sells stocks that are near the resistance price.

For more information on day trading, check out DayTradingModels.com

Greg Chan is a business and finance expert and an active day trader. He has authored several articles on day trading. For more information, visit DayTradingModels.com

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Day Trading Stocks - The Advantages of Trading Volatile Stocks

My hunch is that if you're a novice or inexperienced trader, you will have heard and may have been advised to stay well clear of any stocks that are volatile, or highly volatile. Well, this advice is not necessarily wrong, but you need not overlook these stocks altogether.

Correctly traded, the possibility of higher returns, or returns over a shorter period of time, is a key feature they have, over the less volatile stocks. Because of their nature, their price will move both quite erratically, and further, in any given time frame than their more slowly moving cousins.

Commodities and currencies for example serve to show the characteristics of volatile stocks, and it probably best to trade them of software that allows dual functionality, in that it has both data feed and a trading platform. The advantage of this is that the data feed is real time.

With most end-of-day static trading data feeds, the closing price for the day is downloaded after the market close, and you see it on a static chart. But real time feed is exactly that, and you can open and close your positions literally based on the price movement you see happening in front of you.

Most real time software allows you to zoom in on your position too. You may prefer to trade in a time frame of as little as five seconds, if you wish, so it's really easy to macro-analyse your trades.

Although I wouldn't necessarily advise it, but because you are following your trade face to face so to speak, you could omit using a stop loss facility, which most day traders use, since once they've opened a position they tend to close down and allow the stop loss to do it's work for them.

As said, trading volatile stocks requires close attention, but the advantage of this is there's more potential to gain more from your trade in a shorter time frame. You may only need to be exposed for twenty minutes or sometimes a few seconds. Taking a currency trade like the US Dollar against the UK pound or USD/GBP, for instance, you should be aiming for a maximum gain of say 3 points, no more. This gives your capital the minimum exposure for the maximum return.

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