Question: There are a lot of people who say that day trading is for fools and that it is very difficult to make a living from Day Trading. What are your opinions?
Trading is like most business: it requires commitment and perseverance. It is never easy to make money, but people who have mastered a skill make it appear easy. The really successful pit traders that I have known made trading look very easy, tantalisingly easy; but they all had many years of experience behind them. For every successful trader there has probably been a few hundred who have tried and failed.
Two core skills
I think people fail at any business if they approach it without an appreciation and understanding of what is required for success. The majority of traders fail, because they have no such appreciation and they have unrealistic expectations of themselves. Any trader who starts with the expectation of becoming an instant success is setting himself up for failure.
No one would decide to become a golf pro and assume that they could just pick up a bag of clubs and start winning tournaments. Yet novice traders do this all the time. Just to start with the understanding that trading is a skill that is developed over time, through experience, puts a novice trader way ahead of the competition.
There are two core skills in trading: first the ability to anticipate the market (read the market) and second, having the discipline to execute your plan. To learn to read the market you may as well use a trading simulator and only start to trade when you have demonstrated to yourself that you can anticipate the market. Discipline, though, has to be developed and tested in the real world.
Stick to your own rules
Discipline is really the crux of the matter and it is here that most traders fall down. Their failure is mainly due to the fact that they are not really aware of its importance. Just starting out as a trader with the intention of developing your discipline puts you way ahead of the average trader. If you can trade with discipline (i.e. stick to your own rules and limits) you are 95% there!
Online Trading And System Trading Indeed, online trading has revolutionalised the way common folks like you and me trade
in the capital markets.
Online trading has its pros and cons. Online tradings main pro is convenience and speed, giving a trader maximum control of all aspects of trading. Conversely, online tradings main killer con is in the tons of human error that can happen due to a lack of guidance.
Due to a lack of guidance, most online traders find themselves extremely prone to their emotions when trading online. When they feel the urge to get out of a position simply because their emotions are all fired up, th ..
So I would say that for the average aspiring trader, trading is a fools game; but for those of us who approach the business as a business, with a clear understanding of the unique challenges that trading offers, it is a rewarding and fulfilling career.
About The Author
Day Trading Secrets ... Online trading for beginners ... You need more than the basicsWhen it comes to stock market trading it PAYS to have more knowledge than the rest of the pack. Pure gold can be harvested in each profitable trade that you accomplish. But when you don t know what you are doing stock trading can become a very difficult and life consuming business. You can lose a lot of money and time. Valuable time of your life. Stock trading can resemble the closest thing to a get-poor-fast system when you don t implement a proven stock trade strategy. Even when there are traders that can make more than $5000 on a single trade, it s not unusual for a novice stock trader to l ..
Malcolm Robinson is a former LIFFE floor trader who now trades his own account as well as providing educational material for futures traders.
http://www.online-day-trading-emini-futures.com/
http://www.instinctivetrader.com/
Malcolm E RobinsonDay Trading Skills
