Day trade tips?

[Feetasshead]

Hey meow,
My wife and I are interested in wasting some of our cash on learning some day trading stuff. A few friends have put the bug in her ear and we wanted to learn some about it.
Any of you high speed financial gurus offer some easy advice or some books?
The only websites I know of for beginners is E Trade...is there a better one.

Thanks.

[VoTrooper99]

If she wants to day trade, at least have some fun with it and go to Vegas. You've got better odds on a craps table than you do day trading.

It's for suckers.

[ArticPara]

All I can say is that if you are asking us for advice then you need to paper trade (no money actually invested) for a while until you get your "system" down pat. Track your results and see if you have any real talent and the guts for it.

You may want to consider sticking to one stock and swing trading it. Find a company that oscillates a few points up/down on a fairly regular basis and play those swings.
Its not as sexy as "day trading" but is a less risky approach when starting out.

Learning the technical aspects of trading stock can be pretty daunting. You'll need Level II information, a discount broker that caters to active traders and deep pockets. Always remember that on the other side of the trade is someone with better intel, faster systems and deeper pockets.


But what the hell do I know I'm just a dumb grunt.

[Ops NCO]

You might want to check out www.tradeking.com. I've been a member for several years. Commissions are cheap for equities and options. Lots of investor info in there as well. I've been happy with them.

[Feetasshead]

If she wants to day trade, at least have some fun with it and go to Vegas. You've got better odds on a craps table than you do day trading.

It's for suckers.

Shes a lucky beyotch, she always wins in Vegas but we are cheap and only bet/win 500-600 bucks at a time.

[Zimmy]

I don't do it much but I've made some green with MLER and ZAAP. They go up and down daily with some regularity.

No skill. I just bought 'em and noticed the pattern.

[zuluzerosix]

All I can say is that if you are asking us for advice then you need to paper trade (no money actually invested) for a while until you get your "system" down pat. Track your results and see if you have any real talent and the guts for it.

You may want to consider sticking to one stock and swing trading it. Find a company that oscillates a few points up/down on a fairly regular basis and play those swings.
Its not as sexy as "day trading" but is a less risky approach when starting out.

Learning the technical aspects of trading stock can be pretty daunting. You'll need Level II information, a discount broker that caters to active traders and deep pockets. Always remember that on the other side of the trade is someone with better intel, faster systems and deeper pockets.


But what the hell do I know I'm just a dumb grunt.

No doubt.

Check your local community college, sometimes there are a few courses you can take about trading. Also remember it can be very addicting, almost like a craps table. I know one guy I work with that got addicted to day trading and fucking lost his ass.

On the other hand, my boss make a killing. This is no shit. A few weeks back Ford's stock was $1.10 a share. He goes and buys 10,000 shares. Two weeks later the stock is at $6.50.

[Zimmy]

I got some of that Ford action but on a smaller scale.

[LRS Guy]

From a former broker, my advice is stay the hell away from daytrading unless:

1. You like setting in front of a computor all day

2. Remember "easy come, easy go". sometimes real easy!

3. Don't use your real money, use amount you can lose.

4. Take your profits and put them somewhere safe, like CD or money market

5. The stock market is in a werid place right now. The usual rules don't apply. Big govt is taking control of the marketplace, its not good for business. I don't think we will see a upward trend for a long time to come. If anything we are in a "false" recovery, I'm betting the economy will get worse for the next year or longer.

Wish I was more upbeat.

[Rocket1972]

No doubt.

Check your local community college, sometimes there are a few courses you can take about trading. Also remember it can be very addicting, almost like a craps table. I know one guy I work with that got addicted to day trading and fucking lost his ass.

On the other hand, my boss make a killing. This is no shit. A few weeks back Ford's stock was $1.10 a share. He goes and buys 10,000 shares. Two weeks later the stock is at $6.50.

If my math is correct, that is a $54K profit. Dayum!!!

[Ironic-Mike]

I got some of that Ford action but on a smaller scale.

Same here. Got in at $5.25 and got out when it hit $6.10


back to work, jerk...

[Ironic-Mike]

Lunch time.

This is what I’ve been doing.

I have a spreadsheet with literally over 600 different stocks. They have to follow One Rule; They must give out Dividends. Stocks like Ford haven’t declared dividends in years. While they might be good for the Long Term, I decided to go after both Dividends and stock price.

Take a look at the document I attached. These are all companies that have declared dividends. Following it isn’t hard to do:

Column 1 is normally blank. In that column is reserved for special notes. Like an M is reserved for financial institutions. It stands for Money, A for Airline, T for Transport, O for Oil and U for Utility. Stocks that are from Utilities don’t normally go up and down like industrial stocks; they are generally allowed to make enough money to give out dividends on a regular basis.

Column 2 is their Stock symbol(s). About 20 stocks only have one Symbol. United States Steel for example is an X. Most are three digits; there are a few with Six digits.

Column 3 is the name of the company. If it has a *M it means that they give out a monthly rather than a quarterly dividend.

Column 4 is their latest Declared Dividend.

Column 5 is the stock’s X-Date. It stands for Exclusion Date. People buying stock on that day and later are excluded from receiving the latest Declared Dividend.

Column 6 is for the day Before the X-Date. There are a lot of X-Dates on Mondays. If you want to get in on a companies dividend, this is literally the last day you can buy the stock and get in on it.

Column 7 is a Recent stock price. It isn’t practical to update 500+ stock prices every day. So I just concentrate on stocks of interest.

Column 8 is a derivative of a stocks yield. It is normally the ratio of a company's annual dividend payment vs. the stock's current price. The Dividend Yield is how investors earn a return on their investment in a stock. For instance the current yield of Xerox is 2.45%. I made it a little easier to read and understand. I took the stock price and divided it by the dividend. The lower the number the better the yield.

After finding a good stock I then proceed to look up how the stock has been doing for the last week. Then I look up its last 6 months. I look at the X-Date and how the stock has been doing. If there is a reasonable chance for price advancement I buy the stock.

It doesn’t always work out. After cashing in on CBS – bought at $5.25 and sold for $7.00+ and dividends – I bought VZ-Verizon and T-AT&T. While I’m going to get dividends from both of them, I bought both just before they lost over a dollar each. Right now they are both Finally nearing what I bought them for. I had plans to sell them and use the profits to buy shares of BA-Boeing. But as they went down I don’t think I’ll be able to buy Boeing in time to be worth it. Currently the numbers say go for either NI-NiSource Inc. or SUN-Sunoco. But I may just plain wait.

[Ops NCO]

Interesting, Mike.


I've discovered over the years that I am absolutely not wired to day trade. (I tend to obsessively watch the price movement and tend to sell at the wrong times.) I also don't think much of buy-and-holding, since so much of short term market movement is due to trading sentiment and, if you buy and hold at the wrong time in the market cycle, you can go years without breaking even.

One method I've had a good amount of success with (and would have had more if I'd used it with some of my investments) is the "Automatic Investment Management" system by Robert Lichello. Lichello (who is now deceased) designed an algorithm back in the late 70's in which you established a balance between your stock investments and cash. The algorithm (which you can fairly easily put into an excel spreadsheet) guides you to shift your portfolio between cash and stocks, based on the change in your portfolio value.

The formula actually works very well with high volatility stocks and, unless an investment climbs straight up for an extended period of time, will outperform buy and hold the majority of the time. If you want to bail out of a particular stock, the system has a way for you to do that as well. The system takes emotion out of the buy and sell decisions and "forces" you to buy low and sell high. I use it with ETFs primarily and I like the fact that you are not trying to predict the direction of the stock, but are simply, in a planned fashion, reacting to price changes. You can actually use the formula with an investment that goes down from where you bought it and never returns to it's starting price...and still make a profit.

There are quite a few sites that discuss the AIM system, but one that's a good starting point is http://www.aim-users.com/. I wouldn't recommend it if I hadn't used it myself with good success.

[Ironic-Mike]

I'm not wired into being a Day Trader either.

It took me a couple of weeks to compile my list. I got a copy of a Wall Street Journal and laboriously, day after day, column after column, typed a set of symbols, hit ENTER, and looked to see if the stock gave out dividends. About half the time they haven't. Of the 600+ stocks I have listed, two dozen haven't posted a dividend since March or earlier. Every week I delete some stock or another either because either they no longer give out dividends or their dividend rate is excessively low.

If you look at the last column there, you should see that some numbers are BOLD. Those are the best ratio stocks out there. As you can see they're all under $100. As a General Rule I'm not going to buy that stock over $100. I may miss a stock that is about to go soaring, but that's a risk I'm willing to take.

There are others I obviously don't know about; my database is rather limited. But as I find them I add them. And at the end of the day I take the stocks whose X-Dates have arrived, turn their fonts back to regular from bold and move them to the bottom of my list of stocks. A couple times a week I look up what stocks have just declared a dividend. If I find I already have them I turn the listing into Bold, Cut & Paste it to the bottom where I have the other Candidates (right phrase?). If I find a new one I enter the data along with any others. If the 8th column is under $100 I keep the number bold. Otherwise I revert it to regular. When finished I sort it and print the Hot List out. About once or twice a week I update all the bold stock prices. I don't bother to do the exact, just within 25 cents or so. But the dividend rate and the X-Dates are correct.

So here I am, the entire list if printed is more or less 10 pages long. But I only pay attention to the Hot List. And of the Hot list I pick out a few that I might buy. Currently the latest list has 20 stocks with a column 8 that's under $100. I have a second spreadsheet for them. Currently there are FIVE stocks there. Those are the ones I'm seriously considering buying. I figure out on a simple to look at set of calculations. Take a look at Attached again.

Possible purchase price, name and E-Date, Possible Sell price, where I see how much dividends the given amount will bring, how much the stock will have to be worth to cover brokerage fees, and a way of figuring out how much buying any given stock will cost. Not to mention possible profit or loss depending on the final buy/sell price.

It can be a lot of fun figuring out from what my budget is, what I can buy, adjusting prices, add or subtract per row calculation base (normally add 10 to the above number; there were times I added 25 or 100), and eventually find a price and amount of shares I could buy. Several times I could not accept a higher price and let go a good dividend paying stock by a couple of pennies per stock.

But what I don't buy I can't lose. So I watch, wait, calculate, re-calculate, and if I see something, I hope to strike. At last count I only own 3 stocks. Everybody else I just wait and watch.

Do you think Sunoco might be a good idea? It's my latest Possible.

[Ironic-Mike]

Trying to attach PDF file...