Day Trading

[TheFaQQer]

I remember watching that TV programme with Brillo's brother and thought I'd stay well away from that.

[CoolCat]

Why Nav Sarao Had To Be Destroyed: He Found A Way To Beat The HFTs At Their Own Game | Zero Hedge

[lukemg]

Don't even think about it, you have got a lottery winners chance of making any money and almost a certainty of p*ssing hard earned away.
I read a quote about day trading it said:
Day 1 - Get 5000 in notes out of your bank account. Put it in a pile in your garden, spray with lighter fliud and set light to it.
Sooner or later this will happen when you day trade (ask the 370 people who lost £18m when the swiss removed the Euro track off their currency)

[uk contractor]

Its unregulated by the FCA but if your highly skilled you can make serious money at it although its a full time day job. By that I mean prepare for 12-16 hours a day you can then make a LOT if your able to read the financial markets but most people as others have already said lose & lose a lot so unless you really want to put the research hours in forget it unless you have a high 5 figure sum you can afford to lose that belongs to you & no-one else!


You can have better than 50/50 odds more like 70/30 in your favour perhaps 80/20 if your really able to absorb a lot of data in realtime & make the correct trades with it but the times you lose can wipe out any profits in a few seconds & or mouse clicks!

[BlasterBates]

Day Trading For Dummies, 3rd Edition:Book Information - For Dummies

This is good

http://en.allexperts.com/q/Day-Tradi...Month-Year.htm

As the guy says the immediate objective is not to lose too much in the first year.

I'm running a demo account because it's fun and I might get the hang of it. So far, I think things are better than at the beginning. I can hold the value the of the account better than when I started, where it frittered away pretty quickly.

Only losing 10% after years trading would be certainly something you could be proud of.

That's why you want a demo account or trade very small amounts i.e. aim to make 1 pound a day, which is possible with one broker I'm trying out. On the Forex a a large move on one contract wouldn't lose you more than a few pounds. You need to be doing this for several months to see if you can get the hang of it. At the moment I'm sceptical though, I haven't developed a consistent strategy.

[hydraulicwave]

How about some Spread Trading, practice first, and learn how to analyze charts/trends. This gives you leverage without the exposure. ETX Capital platforms are nice.

[mrv]

Get a demo account and run it for 6 months.

Spread Betting, CFDs, Stockbroking and Forex | Trading | IG UK

That's the way to find out it's a mugs game without losing any money.

When you make a trade to get a profit you have to earn more than the spread that's what the banks pocket. Bankers can earn on day trading but it's very difficult for a mug private trader.

If you have a good source of information trading shares over several months is a better bet, because if it goes sour you just keep them until they go up again, i.e. you turn a trade into a long term investment.

Trading with demo money is very different from trading with real money, psychological pressure and mental games one starts playing with himself are no joke.

I'd say stay away from this trading, as you will most likely burn yourself badly. Don't listen to jocks telling you their uncle or friend's neighbour made millions and you can too. Think about this: football is all about running really fast and kicking the ball really hard, as easy as things go - but no one's chasing you and offering contracts, right? If you really want to give it a try, I'd suggest opening a demo account at some broker, just to get familiar with the terms, buttons etc, so you know what you do - then deposit a grand or so (money you can afford to lose), and see what happens. Just make sure not to redeposit though. This game becomes very expensive before you know it.

[lukemg]

[QUOTE=BlasterBates;
Only losing 10% after years trading would be certainly something you could be proud of.
.[/QUOTE]

WTF ? I am averaging 10.1% annual gain across the portfolio, I would pack it in if I was 10% underwater a year in !!
Dog basic tracker is likely to kick back 9%/year over a 10 year stretch, use this as your marker not I haven't lost everything - result !

[SandyD]

I enrolled on a 3 day course, it will basically go through strategies and products. We will not actually trade during the course. I will also try to open a dummy account soon to practice in my spare time.

After the course I will decide if this is for me or not.

BB what kind of trades / strategy do you use?

[BlasterBates]

I enrolled on a 3 day course, it will basically go through strategies and products. We will not actually trade during the course. I will also try to open a dummy account soon to practice in my spare time.

After the course I will decide if this is for me or not.

BB what kind of trades / strategy do you use?

Well I've tried a few things, started pretty naively, put a bet on, watch it go down, put more on, goes down even further etc... that's how you lose everythng pretty quickly.

Also tried trading on signals provided by IG trading one of the demo account, but they're pretty useless.

I went on the Internet genned up learnt about Bollinger Bands (i.e. trading ranges) Moving averages, Heiken-Ashi and a few basic signals. That seemed to help. The Heikin Ashi was quite a help initially as it helped me make sense of what looked like "random wiggles".

I also took a tip to focus on a few markets, so I've been trading EUR/USD, Gold and DAX on my dummy account. Day trading accounts offer CFD'S (contract for differences) basically you buy a contract and it goes up and down with the market. The thing you have to battle against is the spread, i.e. when you buy Gold for example you immediately have a loss and it goes above the spread before you're in profit. The three markets have the lowest spreads so they're attractive to trade. There are also no commissions on those markets, some products have a charges.

Basically I look at the market each day and look out over 6 months then 1 month, two weeks and then the last two days, try and keep within the max's and min's i.e. never buy when the market at it's upper limit, and try and pitch buys and sells when the market hits "bollinger band" limits. Usually place a trade and my finger ready to close out if the market moves against me, if it does close out immediately and wait, and then try again. So this means quite a few losing trades but when I'm in profit let it run, so that means overall I'm up. Noticed the best times to trade are opening markets Europe 9:00 am and 14:00 pm when New York opens.

You have to read up all this technical stuff but in the end you have to trade on "instinct" i.e. you've live and breathe your chosen markets so you know how it wiggles. I think skills you get playing hours and hours of Doom or Quake, where you have to be fast on the button are more relevant than Economics and Finance. I do keep an eye on the news. If the US comes out with bad figures USD is obviously going to tank, and Gold is probably going to soar (probably between 14:00 and 14:30).

I've been trading for about two weeks now using this strategy and I've made EUR 5000 on an account which was initially EUR 50000. The daily profits are erratic , so I'm still not convinced I can make money long term, could be luck. So I'll continue, if I get to 60000 in the next few weeks I think I'd feel it wasn't luck and might start a real account but trading initially just 1 contract for each trade. I'm trading several hundred at the moment.

You can do it while you're working but a production problem can lose you a grand because you're not watching the market

It's definitely dangerous if you're trying to make serious money, you can lose a lot of money very quickly, eg 1000 quid in a few seconds (Bank says thank you very much), so you need an awful lot of practice before going into a real account.

Probably the key thing is to learn how to limit your losses, that's the first lesson, how to handle losing trades, because I reckon around 50% of your trades will be losers.

It is good fun, it's a bit like playing Doom or Quake, so I might just simply run a dummy account for a few months more.

Long term investing in shares is a lot less stressful and less risky and as Luke says you can earn 10%. I have a shares portfolio which earns 10%, but I'm thinking about investing a small amount in day trading, just for the hell of it.