Day Trading

Also, some good books to start with are;
Trading In the Zone, Mark Douglas
Mastering The Trade, John Carter
High Probability Trading, Link
Trade Your Way To Financial Freedom, Tharp

Learn the basics of "Technical Analysis" before you read these books. Understand Candlestick Charting, Moving Averages, Support & Resistance, RSI, Channels etc.

There are many great books out there…. Don't read any of them until you've gone through these. Don't ever underestimate the importance of money management, position sizing & trading psychology.

This will take at least a year to get through. Do it and you'll save yourself from many costly mistakes.

Second, if you consider yourself a "trader" a lot of weird things happen in the pushing and shoving of the open. The specialists on the floor make a huge amount of money at this time. In this case, it wouldn't surprise me if the specialist/market maker first did a bunch of buying of opening orders (ONT opened at 1.07) and then sold to the opening buy orders at 1.16 (ONT jumped to 1.16 right after the opening) thus making 0.09 per share just for being the specialist/market maker. He has no obligation to match the orders of public buyers with public sellers. It's good to be the market maker. Traders like me always wait to see how the stock opens to get confirmation before placing an order. A lot of things can happen in the news between 1AM and the market open. Traders never put in orders and let them sit that long.

http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/reports/

keeps the biggest gainers/losers by exchange for the past five trading sessions.

But there will be important pointers to what should also be considered while deciding on the trading platform. So here goes.

I have personal experience with ICICIDirect, HDFC Securities and Motilal Oswal. I don't trade on a daily basis and am a long term investor. So for me brokerage rates don't matter much.

For me what matters are the following:
1. Reliability of the platform -I can transact when I want
2. Correctness in transaction records, account debits, demat credits, shortfall management
3. User-friendliness of interface - you can find what you want quickly
4. Promptness of customer helpdesk in replying to emails
5. Ability to do everything from one single place - like demat account, trading account, and bank account are all managed by the same entity, so there is single place of accountability

Given all these in my experience ICICIDirect still scores the best. It has the highest no of subscribers. It used to have some transaction problems earlier, but over the past year, I cannot recollect instances where I couldn't execute a buy/sell when I wanted it. (HDFC Securities & Motilal OSwal both have miles to go on this front, systems cant keep up with the load on exceptionally high traffic days -jan 22/23). Their User interface is the best, you can locate what to do and where very fast, almost intuitively. Their transaction records are impeccable, you have peace of mind. Couldn't say the same for Motilal Oswal (I had to track and remind them to make good the shortfall when I bought and paid for 20 shares of Wyeth Pharma but demat was only for 16 after a week). And single place of accountability makes sure i deal with the same party and can get things resolved faster.

No matter what arguments you hear against, perhaps the biggest argument in favour of ICICIDirect is that they have been operating these services from 1999. That's close to a decade of experience in handling extremes of load, variety of software and technical issues, customer complaints , and have matured over the years.

The others may give you cheaper brokerage rates (and that matters if you are a day trader) but have much more to cover before they can reach similar levels of maturity as a service provider.

My 2 cents. Hope they were useful & happy investing!

test it with quotetraker freeware

The traders have all the news well before you do, so if you are trying to nickel and dime your way to riches by picking a little spurt to long here or a little sag to short there, don't–they've already done it and moved on by the time you spot it.

Also, be very, very careful of the proportional share you trade with, compared to the larger account value. I was trading potatoes once, um, a while back, and some rich guys tried to steer away from a long-established trend. I got a margin call during one of their 'force it' moves and the brokerage confiscated my whole account value and sent me a bill for the rest. Instead of paying off my mortgage, I was paying on my debt for two years. Without the extra traffic, the general trend was right and I would have profited nicely–but I didn't have enough reserve for when it suddenly went radically against me. I do have one consolation, though, something like 90 millionaires got caught in a still larger default, and several dozen went to jail.

Feel lucky that your account balance is "slowly decreasing"–things could be much worse. Check the charts for agricultural spreads and straddles, many of the patterns I used to rely on don't work any more, but see if you can find some of your own, then play it safe. If nothing else, go to currencies and short the dollar and go long on almost anything else. Good luck.

earnings.com (great during earnings season)

Here's another one I read & enjoyed:
Technical Analysis Explained - Martin Pring

An overview, which I read in French:
Technical Analysis from A to Z - Stephen B. Achelis

There are a number of texts involved in preparing for the CMT exam, see below link on MTA. Just going through the effort of preparing for the CMT exam is a great learning experience.

There is also my own trading website link, last one in the list below.

A final note, there is alot of learning aside from the technical analysis. One friend of mine noted and many traders agreed: "you don't have to be smart to be a good trader, just disciplined." Keep it in mind and good luck!