To trade and/or invest you need four major programs in place before you do anything.
1 A written sound trading/investment plan with rules that will not only help you but more importantly protect you, mostly from yourself.
2 – Sufficient trading/investment capital. Use your own money, there’s no need to go into debt so that you trade/invest.
3 – A written money management program in place. Remember never invest 100% of your capital into any one security and never have 100% of your capital invested.
4 – A full and complete understanding of the rules & regulations of the industry.
Judging by the wording of your question you’re no where near being ready to do anything in the market. I’m not saying this as a put down but rather as a warning before you hurt yourself financially.
I found the answers I was looking for at this site – http://www.traderstatus.com/whyanentity.htm
Depending on what you invested in, you could have to register with the SEC. Additionally, you would be signing up for double taxation! You would have to pay additional legal and accounting fees, and could have your quarterlies audited by the IRS.
There are absolutely no advantages to this scheme. Never mind that if you tried to become a trader for a living, you would become homeless, as more than 90% of "day traders" lose more than 2/3 of their capital in the first year.
Not to mention that this would look a hell of a lot like money laundering to an outsider (someone who creates a shell holding corporation to avoid having his name attached to the movement of significant amounts of cash moving across state lines is a pretty good way to meet some kind agents from the FBI).
It's never a good idea to try to outsmart the federal government – sure, they might not be the smartest bunch in the room, but they sure know how to hold a grudge.
For more clarification, there are about 252 trading days in a year. On average, looking at the history of the stock market, what percentage of these days are "up" days for the market.
Say you want data on the Dow. Go to http://finance.yahoo.com, click on Dow, then click on Historical Prices. Set the date range and click Get Prices.
Highlight the resulting table, Ctl-C to Copy, and then Ctl-V to paste into a spreadsheet program such as MS Excel. It may take several pages to get all of the data.
Simplest way: In the spreadsheet program, create another column, call it Change, next to the last column of numbers (Adjusted Close). Calculate this column as the value directly to the left, minus the value above and to the left. Count the minus signs (down days) and the zeros. Subtract from the number of rows and you'll get the pluses.
A more elegant way, if you are intimate with how to do formulas in your program, is to do an IF statement that does the following: IF the Adjusted Close is greater than the previous Adjusted Close, then enter 1; otherwise, enter 0. At the bottom of this column, have it calculate the sum. That will be the number of UP days.
Best of success.
But if you open your portfoilio via http://www.finance.yahoo.com then it will refresh automatically, but here it is delayed by 20 minutes.
I tried the 15 day free trial and was making over 30% annual interest on my money. They showed how I could make more but also had to take bigger risk trading. I was able to swing some trades for positive return of 10% in 15 days trading conservatively with a demo account. I have only been in the forex market for a short time but found it very intriguing.
Thanks for your responses in advance.
However, finding a good opportunity tends to leave at least some cash floating around. Aside from dumping it into a placeholder stock like BRK.B, moneymarket, etc. I am interested in utilizing, to some small degree, daytrading.
Basically:
(1) How is risk managed in security day trading? Forex trading?
(2) Do the few successful traders operate by intuition or determinism?
(3) How wide of a scope to most traders take? Ten stocks? One hundred? All of them? Similarly, how wide of a scope do forex'ers employ?
(4) Is there a way to get a hold of raw market data, outside of the wacky software like eSignal, etc?
Please do not try and pitch a trading system. Thanks.
A Free Basic Hands-on Training is available at http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/currencytrader/.