When you are heading out into the world after college or high school, you are going to be able to find a job. Whether it is waiting on tables, or folding clothes at the Gap or selling insurance, you are going get a gig. The question is: Are you going make that your career?
Probably not. All those jobs are dead ends. So how do you breakout and create a real career that you don’t hate? You can carve out a nice, lucrative career by learning how to day trade. Plus, if you do it right, you won’ need to deal with an office or a boss or commute or annoying colleagues. You get to control your own destiny.
Now, it will be a bit of a tough go at first. First of, just think of all the terminology you are going to learn. Bull flag, tick pilot program, gap & go, gapper, paper trading, swing trading, chart patterns. And that is just the start. The lingo, just like with any field of study, is half the battle.
The first step is to immerse yourself in day trading classes. There, you can learn techniques that will help you identify stocks that are ready to make real moves throughout the day. That is one of the secrets of day trading. You only need to figure out a few stocks per day and jump on them at the right time. Sounds simple, right? It’s not. But, those strategies are teachable.
Strategy and Discipline are Key
Beyond the strategy, then, is the discipline. You need to know how to manage risk. In fact, you need to know how to manage risk with your whole self, not just your mind. It needs to be ingrained. Make sure you are taking just the right amount of risk is part of the secret sauce that makes successful day traders. It is all about balance. You need to be able to stomach some risk, so that you can find the profit, but you also need know when to stop.
And that brings us to paper trading. Or trading in a simulator. A paper trading simulator is where you can practice your skills before you trade any real cash out on the market. When you start on a simulator, you get a nice chunk of virtual currency and you get to trade in an environment that acts just like a the real, live stock market.
You need to find a good simulator that has Level II quotes and has a simulated brokerage account that executes trades just like real life. It is going to take a few months of practice before you make enough virtual profit to justify trying the real deal. But all that practice time is worth it.
You Have to Understand Risk
You get to internalize risk management and time trades in a way that you don’t get to do in regular classroom instruction. That experience is invaluable. Without that experience, you are going to go out into the regular stock market and potentially get eaten alive. Letting a trade go too long or falling in love with a trade is a mistake you should only make with fake money. Then you learn to never do it when you are working with your own hard-earned cash.
Beyond the techniques and the practical skills, there is still the networking. Spending time in a daily trader chat room is an excellent way to cement your knowledge and get to know other traders. Day trading can be a very isolating business, so to find a community of traders is very important to having a fulfilling experience.
What you might hear about, when you venture out into the day trading world, are stories about veteran traders making loads of cash in just a couple of month. One legendary one concerns a trader who was able to take just a little more than $500 and turns that into nearly $100,000 in just a couple of months. Keep in mind that traders who have put in the time and gone through the ringer of the market accomplish these feats. Read up on the Warrior Trading reviews on the net, they are the real deal and could provide a nice cushion for building up retirement savings if you are responsible and invest what you can afford to risk.
Put in the Hours and Get the Results
The bottom line is, you gotta put in the hours. There are no shortcuts. Those initial hours are going to be studying and paper trading. The value in that time is that you will develop the skills and intuition that will pay off in the real market.
If you want to be a day trader, it can be a very rewarding and flexible career. You just need to understand the time and effort you need to put in in order to get those benefits.