Finding the Perfect Day Trading Strategy

Finding the right day trading strategy is about matching up the trader's personality and strengths with the techniques used in the field. Doing so can help increase a trader's success rate.

Day trading is the practice of buying and selling financial instruments, such as securities, within the same trading day. Traders who practice day trading are called active traders or day traders. This field used to reserve for financial firms, fund mangers, investment firms, and banks. With the advent of electronic and online day trading, however, it has become accessible to almost anybody interested in the practice.

The Various Strategies Employed

As you can well imagine, there are nowadays a variety of strategies and techniques being used by active traders in order to ensure they can benefit financially. These include:

Contrarian Investing, News Playing, Rebate Trading, Trend Following

Contrarian investing is basically a form of day trading which follows the ideology that those securities which have been rising steadily, will eventually begin to fall. If securities have been falling, then the exact opposite view is applied.

News playing is basically a technique used to buy and sell securities based primarily on news which has been made available by a specific company.

Rebate trading is another popular strategy which uses ECN rebates as the main source of income. Generally speaking, traders who use this strategy will usually purchase low priced securities in vast quantities.

Scalping on the other hand involves establishing and liquidating financial securities in a very short space of time. In fact, it is not uncommon for traders who follow this route to purchase and sell securities within minutes, or even seconds.

Trend following is basically the opposite of contrarian investing, in that the strategy is based on the principle that securities which have been rising steadily will continue to do so, while those securities which have been falling steadily will continue to fall.

Other popular trading strategies include the likes of Short Sells and Range Trading.

Finding the Perfect Strategy

Alarmingly enough, it is said that approximately 80% of day traders end up losing all their available capital before they manage to learn about the various trading strategies, and this is why it's imperative to start out slowly, and to limit yourself to taking small risks. Below are a few tips which can help you in determining what the right day trading strategy for you is.

Match the right strategy with the right trader - It is important to match the trader's personality, strengths, comfort level, and investing freedom with the right strategy. Those who are less inclined to take risks may benefit from scalping, news playing and rebate trading. Risk takers on the other hand may have no problem using trend following and contrarian investing.

Start Small and Try Things Out - Starting with small investments is a good way for a new day trader to learn the pros and cons of a specific strategy. It is also a low risk of figuring out how the business works.

Day traders can of course also benefit financially from using multiple strategies at the same time. For example, you could consider investing the majority of your capital using one of the low risk strategies, while at the same time investing some capital using one of the high yielding strategies.

About the Author

Are you tired of scraping by at your day job? Why not get into the stock trading and make some money the easy way... with the guidance of artificial intelligence! Learn more about how to make money trading now. You can also check trading for a living info.

by: Peter Skonctue
Total views: 1 Word Count: 579 Date: Sun, 7 Mar 2010 Time: 4:16 AM 0 comments

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