Day Trading as a Day Job

Day Trading As a Day Job

Many people that want to get into the day trading world want to escape the drudgery of a cubicle job, with bosses and memos and mandatory happy hours. But others see an opportunity to turn day trading into a day job that doesn’t depress them. A day job with the flexibility and excitement that can keep them engaged, but also make them a decent living.

When you get into the day trading industry, the first rule you have to remember is that you will not be an overnight, or even an over 29 nights, success. The industry is just too fast paced, too intense, to cognitively demanding for novices to make a killing right off the bat. Newbies need to learn new lingo, new strategies and, frankly, new philosophies in order to be successful day traders. That is not easily accomplished.

The same goes for investors that are making the switch to day trading. One of the first things traditional traders may learn is that day trading is completely different from investing. Investing naturally has a long-term, conservative outlook. You want your money to work for you, slowly and with as little risk as possible.

In day trading, you are doing the work, instead of compound interest doing the heavy lifting. You scan the market for opportunities, you take the risk of trading on margin with borrowed money and you make the call for when to enter a stock and when to leave. Passive investing has its place for the Warren Buffett worshippers of the world, but day trading is where the adrenaline flows and the profits grow.

Even though you are going to need to put in time to really be a consistently profitable trader, it is possible to make a lot of money in a very short period of time. There are stories of real money makers, starting out with accounts of less than $1,000 and racking up profits nearing the six-figure mark in just a couple months. But that takes years and years and years of study and sacrifice. If you can do that, it means you have spent time in a trading simulator, honing your skills and your instincts, It means you have developed risk management skills that allow you stay disciplined and make the right calls on the wrong stocks.

What is meant by that is that many inexperienced day traders make the classic mistake of staying too long in a stock, either trying to ride out an unexpected hot streak to profits or sweat out a terrible unanticipated nose dive in the hopes of a rally, Every trade needs a stop-loss point. You need to know exactly when the threshold if for enough’s enough and you need to stick to it.

Many newbie day traders find value it learning how to trade in a simulated trading environment. That means a computer program that mimics the real-time environment of the stock market, that provides simulated currency and allows you to try our trading with no risk to your life savings. It is absolutely essential to avoid becoming one of the dreaded 90%.

The dreaded 90% is a reference to the amount of day traders that attempt to get into the game and never make a profit. That’s right. Only 10% of traders ever make a real go of it. That is not a reason not to go for it, but it is a reason to invest in day trading education before you make the leap.

Day trading education is essential because it gives newbies a head start in a competitive and complicated market. Sites such as Warrior Trading, the chat room and day trading education website, can provide online classes, simulated trading rooms and access to a daily chat room that is frequented of thousands of profitable and chatty traders. Learning from a group like that is invaluable.

From momentum trading to gap & go trading to reversal trading, the list of strategies is compact, but proven out by Warrior Trading veterans. They tend to focus on real, proven techniques that have years of favorable profit/loss data to back them up.

For example, momentum trading is just as simple as identifying a good stock early in the morning and taking a position as soon as the market opens. Once you see the stock move up in price, you lock in your profit and get out. Do that day after day and you will be able to grow your portfolio. But it takes time and effort to get the point where you can pick the right stocks and get in and out at the right times.

So the bottom line is that day trading needs real discipline and effort to become a day job. Can you make lots of money is just a couple months? Sure. But only if you are already a master day traders. If you decide to take the leap, invest in the proper education, so the you end up in a pile of money