Finances

Are you thinking of entering the fast-paced world of day trading? Arm yourselves with the information from this fact sheet on day trading.

What is day trading?

Day trading is an investment tactic that does online daily stock trading with a relatively short investment. Those who do day trading usually buy and sell securities during the same market day and, as a general rule, do not hold stocks overnight. Many day traders make dozens of trades every market day hoping to capture profits that arise from small intraday price fluctuations.

How is day trading different from swing trading?

Day trading relatively holds the stock for only the day. After the stock market closes, a day trader has no stock in his hands. Swing trading holds a stock for at least a few days, waiting out for the best price before dumping it back to the market. Day trading is much more stressful and requires guts and a keen business sense. Once you get good at day trading, you can earn up to $50,000 from your initial investment.

How much capital would you need for day trading?

Indeed large multinational and individual banks and other major financial institutions have dominated FX trading (also known as Forex trading), but there is a paradigm change in the nature and type of investing. According to one estimate, in the new millennium, there are over 6 million online investment accounts, up from 1.5 million in 1997. As a result, start-up firms now compete directly with financial institutions to serve investors in the new technologically driven economy, and the clear winner is the customer. The competition between the brick and mortar institutions and the Internet-based companies has dramatically lowered the costs of investing, and empowered the individual investor to take control of their own investment strategy in Forex trading.

We know Forex trading is direct access trading of currencies. In the past, foreign exchange trading was limited to large banks and institutional traders but recent advancements in technology have allowed small traders to take advantage of the many benefits of Forex trading using online trading platforms to trade. Virtually Forex trading is done 24 hours day and almost 5 ½ days of a week. In the recent times, online trading has revolutionized the currency markets by making it accessible to the small and medium sized investor.

The simplest definition of currency trading is the practice of exchanging one country’s currency for another country’s currency. Basically, currency trading involves four main variables: currencies, exchange rate, time, and interest rate. The interplay of these variables creates opportunities for small investors to obtain investment returns that are generally unheard of in the traditional investment world. It is also referred to as foreign exchange, FX or Forex, but the essence remains the same that currency trading is the exchange of one currency against another.

Perhaps, in terms of trading volume, the currency exchange market is the world’s largest market, with daily trading volumes in excess of $1.5 trillion US dollars (although the figures may differ, but this is just an approximation to show its importance). One thing is for sure that in orders of magnitude it is much larger than the bond or stock markets. For example, the New York Stock Exchange has a daily trading volume of approximately $50 billion. So you can easily imagine its importance in the trading world of today. Moreover, contrary to earlier thoughts, currency trading is not limited to just larger organizations and other large banks and financial institutions, but open to everyone who has enough expertise and determination to hard work.

The question would be not whether she could but rather would she enter the Forex trading market. The Forex day trading arena is a veritable snake pit ripe for scam artists to bilk money out of unwary investors. On the other hand, it is a forum for educated traders with the correct education, tools, and trading strategy to make a handsome income.

Becoming a successful Forex trader basically comes down to four things; 1) attaining the correct education, 2) using Forex tools which 3) use your own personal trading strategy, and 4) finding the correct Forex broker to fulfill your requirements. Let’s look at these individually:

1) Attaining the correct education. Your Mother may not know the difference between a Forex PIP and one of the backup singers for Gladys Knight. So would you send her to one of those infomercial Forex riches classes to find out? We hope not! There are literally hundreds of training courses and materials out there for proper training. Word of mouth recommendations might be the best path to follow here.

Are you looking into a career in day trading? In the past, the tools for day trading were available only to professionals. But thanks to the power of the Internet, everything you need to get started is now conveniently online. If you have a nose for business, guts and a sharp instinct for how the market shifts, the maybe day trading is the job for you.

What is day trading? Basically it is daily, online stock trading with very short investment. The individuals who do this day in and day out are called traders, not investors in the traditional sense. A day trader is someone who will buy a stock that has high volume and liquidity and will sell that same stock within a few minutes up to a few hours.

Day trading happens only during the day. Those who do day trading usually stay glued in front of the computer and monitoring which stocks have a fast turnover. During the day trading, they quickly buy a large number of stocks at a time and sell it once they see the stock gain within the day. Day traders will make a purchase of a stock, hold it for only minutes watching constantly for the stock to go up or down, selling if it goes down only two or three cents and holding if it goes up to about five or six cents and selling. The stock is almost never held over night as there are many other opportunities and a stock that takes hours to move is not worth holding.

To trade on the forex market, the largest financial market on the planet, one must use a forex broker. Not unlike a stock broker, a forex broker can also makes suggestions about which moves to make when exchanging foreign currency. Some forex brokers even supply technical analysis to some of their clients and offer tips on research to improve their success as forex traders.

Typically in the forex market a forex broker is a banking institution who may buy up large amounts of a certain currency. For years, banks were the only ones who had access to the forex markets. But today with the Internet, any forex trader, who subscribes with a forex broker, can access the market 24 hours a day.

Today, as with stock brokers, the brick and mortar institutions, such as banks, are less of an option for the individual forex trader who works from home, monitoring the news and gaining insight into certain technical information to help with his or her trading decisions.

There is one very important factor that you should consider with great care if you are willing to become a successful, profitable Forex trader. This ever important factor that must be always present in the trader’s portfolio, is the ability to read the charts.

The beauty of FOREX charts, as opposed to charts used for, say, daytrading stocks, is that they are pretty easy to interpret and use. They’re a reflection of a slower-moving, stable economy (the one of a country) compared to the future and daily drama of company reports, Wall street analysts and shareholder demands.

And, unlike stocks, currency charts rarely spend much time in tight trading ranges and have the tendency to develop strong trends (even though the FX market may be volatile, it’s more predictable). And, rather than tens of thousands of stocks to analyze, you only have a few mayor currencies to trade.

The most common types of price bars, used in FOREX trading, are the Bar Chart and the Candlestick chart:

Forex trading, or foreign currency trading, has become a bit of a craze of late, especially since it is something available to anyone who owns a computer. And anyone who is willing to put in some training time can profit from forex trading.

The forex market finds traders from all around the globe monitoring currency fluctuations, not unlike the way a day trader may monitor a stock’s fluctuation on the Dow Jones.

In forex trading, a trader will pair two types of currency, for example the U.S. dollar and the British pound. As it requires more of one currency to purchase another, that currency loses value. Not unlike, stock trading, forex traders try to accumulate currency when it weakens in hopes of selling it when it goes up in value. Forex trading is not unlike the buy low, sell high approach found in stock trading.

The way a trader on the forex market exchange goes about acquiring currency is by giving a bid/ask quote, saying he is willing to buy, for example 1.6 marks per dollar and sell them at 1.625 per dollar. One must be a market trader to have access to this process. So most people who are forex trading on line buy the currency through a bank, where they’ll pay a commission, then have to figure the commission paid to the bank into the calculation of their spread, or profit margin, when they sell it.

Everyone trades a little differently. The trading method outlined below is MY personal approach to trading. This method has worked for me for the last 20 years, and has helped me to avoid big draw downs since the mid 1980’s. My trading strategy has helped me to make a good living trading.

It takes some time to learn my method of trading because it’s based on tape reading and getting a “feel” for the market. This is *not* about a fast,easy formula to “get rich quick” while you sweat out every trade. Instead, this is about developing confidence and trading consistently without fear and without big draw downs.

Here is my 10 Step Approach to Learning My Style of Trading:

1. Practice exiting trades at break-even, using a one-tick target, a two or three tick soft stop (mental stop) and a 1.5 point hard stop. Never *allow* the market hit your hard stop. Exit by moving your target toward your hard stop, not by moving your hard stop towards your target. With time, all of this must become a reflex. You won’t always be able to keep your losses down to 2 ticks, but only on rare occasions should you find yourself letting the market hit your hard stop. (”Rarely” means only about once every 50-100 trades after you get the hang of it.)

The investor in the currency market takes for granted that a pair of currencies can be bought or sold at a moment’s notice. Once an order is placed with a broker, the trade is executed within seconds. It is, of course, not as easy as that.

Whenever a pair of currencies is bought or sold, there must be someone at the other end of the transaction. It is very unlikely that the investor will always find someone who is interested in buying and selling the same two currencies at the same amount, and at the same time. Hence, the question remains, "How is it possible that the forex investor can buy or sell at any time?" This is where the forex market makers come in.

The forex market maker is a bank or brokerage company that stands ready, every second of the trading day with a firm bid and ask price. This is good for the investor because when the investor chooses to buy and sell a pair of currencies, the market maker will purchase from and sell to the investor, even if they do not have a buyer and seller lined up. In doing so, they are literally "making a market" for the currencies.