Day trading can be an amazing way to make good money, or an amazingly stressful occupation. No matter what some may say, it’s not an easy ride. You have to put some serious work into it.
Day trading in commodities or stocks is, at base, a job. While it can be a highly lucrative job, it’s also one that means you need some basic traits to succeed. You also need some specific habits, and they have to be so ingrained they’re automatic.
The first thing you need is a great sense of time. Anyone who has trouble getting up first thing in the morning or needs to jumpstart with that first cup of coffee will only be miserable day trading. That’s because the best time to figure out what you’ll be doing on the market on a particular day is right before the opening bell. That happens at nine am in New York City - six am in California and five am in Hawaii and Alaska. You can’t just be an early riser, though. You also have to have an excellent internal scheduling system and clock.
Habit number two that you’ll need is having a good set of skills for quantitative thinking. You’ll make or lose money in day trading just by operating on gut instinct. Making informed decisions, on the other hand, requires you to be able to look at numbers and understand them completely without even thinking about it. This means that numeracy and the ability to deal with numbers in your head is vital if you’re going to tell whether something’s a blip or a trend, and deal with it correctly.
Of course, that doesn’t mean you have to be a trained mathematician. You can learn how to deal with numbers correctly, even it’s never been your strong suit. Some numerical skills can almost become second nature once you get going.
Habit number three is maintaining good observational skills, being incredibly patient, and learning to forget. This can be pretty hard, since you have to keep yourself from feeling let down when you don’t catch a stock at its top, or when you lose money on a short sale that never turns up. Don’t get caught up in either your wins or your losses, or you’ll lose focus and money.
Dedicated research is habit number four. You won’t have to consume accounting statements the way someone in long term conventional investing does, but you have to constantly be getting new data and analysis. You also have to be proactive about your buying and selling, and make fast, accurate judgments, then act on them just as quickly. The only way to make the correct decision is to have the right research. Just don’t let it paralyze you.
Remember that a lot of the research and analysis won’t need to be done by you directly. The best traders always have a number of tools at their disposal, as well as many different data services and research sources ready to access.
If you’re interested in starting in day trading as a career, you’ll have to get the right support, too. You need a good broker, and some other investors who are willing to help you use leverage on the market. Remember that what you’re doing is work, and that you need to have focus and a strong will, as well as being smart, to make it work.
If you believe that you have all these skills, day trading offers an exciting and fascinating way to make a huge income. It’s a job you can honestly consider fun, and if you have what it takes, it’ll be pretty enriching, too.