Day Trading

For the price, you can't beat Telechart. It has everything you'll need in one place. Speed and efficiency is unsurpassed. You can sort thru 8000 stocks in seconds to find any criteria (and I mean ANY criteria) you can think of. If it's not a function of TC, then you can easily write your own personal criteria formula.

Each function key on your keyboard can represent 12 different chart configurations, so you can look at these 12 different criteria in seconds. As soon as you hit the "F" key, the chart is displayed on your screen.

Did I mention that it has all the industry groups? If you looking at a stock and you want to know how the industry is doing, just switch over to the industry group with a click of the mouse.

All the indicies are also grouped together. You can also download that group of stocks that meet your criteria into a CSV file for importing to XL. I especially like this feature.

The support you get from the Wordens is unsurpassed also, and I couldn't get by my day without reading the daily wisdom from Peter or Don.
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Nothing. You bought stock. You own the shares until you sell them. The stock price can fluctuate up or down–no way to tell in which direction–if you own it for more than a day.

If you trade on margin you borrow some of the funds that you use to purchase an investment. If the stock drops below a certain threshold, your broker may decide that you don't have enough equity to hold the investment and may force you to sell the stock. But that hopefully won't happen.

Day trading is tricky, whether your doing it for real or as an exercise like you are doing here. The primary problem is that over very short periods of time, individual stocks as well as the stock market indexes can be extremely volatile. You might as well throw darts at a dart board marked out with all of the stock symbols because it pretty much is sheer luck over such a short time frame anyway.

I'm not familiar with CNBC's Million Dollar Portfolio Challenge, so I don't know what their investing time horizon is like for this task. Depending on how long that horizon is, I would probably make different sets of choices for your million dollars. Over a longer horizon, I would probably do some research and then pick 20 stocks, $50,000 each, and then let them sit there and do nothing for several months as that is, historically, the best way to get a return on investment. Too much "in and out" of the market would kill you on commission costs alone anyway.

You better know what you're doing and have been doing for a while. and thay you understand the maket and the rules governing it.

Here are four rules you must have, if you don't you will loose money
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.

Here are some of the rules that I follow, in additiona to the four cardinal rules above.
Never buy or sell based on anyone's, including your own, market predictions.
Stick with up-trending stocks.
Never buy stocks in danger of filing for or actually in bankruptcy.
Never average down.
Always sell when management cuts sales or earnings forecasts.
Only buy stocks with real sales and real earnings.
Always diversify between industries.
Don't buy stocks just because they've gone up.
Never sell a stock because an analyst proclaims it is overvalued.
Always look for companies with new ideas, new styles or new products.
Orders after an execution – a “stop loss”
No security is to be purchased at a price that is below the 50-day moving average price.

Good luck, based on your question, you're going to need it

Puts are exchange traded options; they are definately public as long as you are trading them. As a buyer of a put option, it gives you the right to sell your stock at a pre-determined price, called the exercise price.

For instance, if you own stock now selling at $10 each and want to protect your portfolio against losses, you could buy a put option. Say, your stop loss is 10% loss. You would either sell your stocks when they fall below $9 each. However, this would not guarantee a stop loss because every seller would be freaking out and wanting to sell these stock. So, the stock price might even fall to say $7 each, missing your stop loss.

To hedge against the extra loses, you would have bought put options that would give you a right to sell your stocks at $9 each regardless of how low the stock prices would fall.

Another way of benefitting from options would be to write a spread. At the moment, because the market is bearish, writing bearish call spreads would be the best way to make a lot of money. However, because these spreads are credit spreads, no broker would let you write the spread, without you having an amount of cash in your account, should your credit spread go wrong and your written options get exercised.

These strategies of write credit spreads are better left to more experienced investors. If you are fairly new at stockmarket inveting, I would suggest that you put your money in less volatile investment vehicles like fixed income stuff like savings bonds, CDs etc.

So you've been short term trading a highly speculative market and losing your pants. Now you want a risk free method to trade this market? Are you seeing an issue?

Definitions time folks:

Savings – reserve funds invested in a safe vehicle to protect ones assets and receive a small return in exchange for giving up current purchasing power.

Investing – putting capital at calculated risk in order to achieve higher returns.

Trading – Speculating on short term movements of securities prices, involves high levels of personal risks but provides benefits of providing extra liquidity & effecientacy to securities market.

Now professional traders, a) have the financial ability to withstand prolonged periods of losses, b) understand there is no "perfect" method, and c) even if they had found something even bordering on effective, wouldn't distribute it freely as it would dilute the efficacy of their method (And with the current state of the mortgage markets we're learning just how falliable even those "propietary" methods can be).

Sounds like you need to back up. Start building your savings, then your investments. After that, if you must, you can start a trading account. But, honestly I've made far more in two years of investing, than I did in 10 years of trading. (Simple math lesson one, if a stock drops 50%, from that point it has to go up 100% for you to break even — meaning minimize your loses is more vital than maximizing your gains).

Low volume does not mean poor investment. Just means its not on people radar. There are alot of things to take into consideration like how many shares or outstading or in the float. If there are very few shares then it will not take alot to move the stock up or down. A stock could go up or down 20% on as few as 100 shares traded depending on the size of the float. Also what does the chart look like? Has it been flat for 2 years or is there alot of movement?

Day Trading refers to the practice of buying and selling financial instruments within the same trading day such that all positions will usually (not necessarily always) be closed before the market close of the trading day. Traders that participate in day trading are called day traders

Some of the more commonly day-traded financial instruments are stocks,stock options, currencies and a host of futures contracts such as equity index futures, interest rate futures, and commodity futures.

Day trading used to be the preserve of financial firms and professional investors and speculators. Many day traders are bank or investment firms employees working as specialists in equity investment and fund management. However, day trading has become increasingly popular among casual traders due to advances in technology, changes in legislation, and the popularity of the Internet.

Check the website below and have a look may be it will help you more in deciding.

http://money-review-site.com/investment.html

YOu do your research.

Read books like popular science/popular mechanics, etc and look for trends that are plausible. Then look for some companies that specialize in these areas, and invest in the best ones.

Another good thing to do is read two of Peter Lynch's books "One Up On Wall Street" and "Beating The Street". He details in his book how he used common sense to turn Fidelity's Magellan fund into one of America's biggest and best. He bought little known companies which went on to become well known companies.

I've worked in the investment industry for many years, and I've had many people come up to me and say that they could make more money than I can. I took many people up on their offer, and less than 5% of these people have actually beaten me (and I'm no world beater – it just shows that people aren't as smart as they think they are)