Day Trading

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.

For the quality of research and tools available, I'd recommend Fidelity or Schwab.
///

For day trading commodity market is best they are not suitable for long term strategy.

if you desire stock market (even Indian Stocks) you should go with technical analysis (search engines like Yahoo, Google, MSN give you link to may sites) – it is like swimming in sea shore.

Most people loose money bacause they do not have a strategy and money management rules in place

if u dont have disipline dont even start u will loose all your money

many people do trade and have become very very rich so it can be done

The best way to get started: LEARN as much as you can about the market. And then start trading on a paper trading account to gain experience.

If you are new to trading, then you should definitely take a look at trading systems.

Here's why:

Every minute more than 150 Million Dollars change hands in the electronic index futures markets like the e-mini S&P and e-mini NQ. You can win or lose thousands of dollars in a few minutes; the futures markets can make you rich in a few weeks or months or wipe out your account with no mercy.

If you want to compete in the “game of games” and play against the best traders in the world, then you need to get ready. Too many gamblers are entering the arena without any plan or strategy, completely unprepared, and that's why they lose.

Trading a system will dramatically increase your chances to succeed in trading, because it eliminates five of the top six reasons why unprepared traders fail.

Here are the top six reasons why traders fail,
and how a trading system eliminates them

Let's take a look at the reasons why traders lose money:

1. Lack of a Trading Plan
2. Lack of Discipline to Follow the Plan
3. Failure to Control Emotions
4. Failure to Accept and Limit Losses
5. Lack of Commitment
6. Over-Trading

By all means you have to avoid these mistakes if you want to win.

Here's how a trading system eliminates 5 of the 6 top reasons why traders fail:

Solution #1: Having a trading plan

Having a trading system means having a pre-defined set of rules you have developed to guide your trading. Therefore you HAVE a trading plan, eliminating the No.1 cause for failure.

Solution #2: Following the trading plan

The easiest way to follow a trading plan is to automate it. Almost every trading system can be automated, and you could let the computer trade for you. You won't have to worry about your discipline any longer, as the computer mechanically trades every setup for you.

Solution #3: Controlling emotions

Trading with a system removes emotions from trading. If you don't have a strategy and you try to make decisions when the market is moving, you are liable to become emotionally attached to positions. You may experience panic and indecision when the market does not move in your favor, as you do not have a prepared response. That's when most traders lose their money. If you follow a system you will know what to do no matter what the market does.

Solution #4: Controlling your losses

You probably have heard the saying “Let your profits run”. Unfortunately most traders let their losses run. A trading system will get you out of a position when the predefined stop is hit. Unless you override the system to “give the trade a little bit more room” it will stop the loss and therefore limit your losses.

Solution #5: Commitment

You won't believe how many traders show a lack of commitment and therefore lose money. Lack of commitment means that they stop trading after the first loss, and don't give their system a chance to make back the money they lost. Trading is not a one-way street, and losses are part of our business. If you can't accept the fact that there will be losses, you shouldn't trade. Fortunately a trading system can help you to overcome this problem; an automated trading system continues trading according to the rules, and therefore adds much more consistency to your trading.

As you can see, five of the six top reasons why traders lose money in the markets are simply eliminated when you start trading with a system.

Without any guarantee, your chances of making money rise incredibly when starting with a profitable trading system.

Hope that helps.

It's not possible to know how much could you earn.
But you also need to ask yourself how much could you lose.
If you ignore the risks you'll be taking you won't last too much time on the market.

About the intraday or long term trading: basically the best trading strategy is the one that fits your personality. But keep in mind that for short term trading you would need much more than Rs5000.

Good luck on your trading

Banerjida,

You answered your question yourself, isn't it. Buying a stock is not a lottery ticket, it is part ownership in the business. If the business does well over the long term, so will the stocks performance. I am sure you have lots of examples in front of you -companies like ITC, HDFC, Ranbaxy, Infosys, and many more that have been doing well for decades, so have their stocks, if you held on to them.

Dada, its time you read a real Investing book, Try One up on Wall Street by Peter Lynch, to start with. You will forget about wasting time in evolving trading strategies, and invest the time and effort in picking real good stocks, as Peter Lynch practically shows you how to. (There are better books to start with, but I am guessing you will enjoy the anecdotal style adopted by Peter Lynch more than the slightly more academic but nevertheless excellent reads like The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham)

If you want to build long term wealth, change tack NOW. Or else, if you have enough money to fritter away, keep trying at the 1: 99 odds!

The most successful investor of all time warren buffet uses the buy and hold forever strategy. He picks stock that are of quality names like coke, gillete and so forth. waits till the price on the company is attractive and buys it. This strategy is also very advantagous tax wise too as any capital gains on stocks held less than a year are taxed at a regualar income rate. Long term capital gains are taxed at lower rates. Plus you are taxed on your capital gains when you sell your shares so if you are buying shares and selling them then buying new ones right away then you will have to use other sources of income to pay your taxes unless you are trading in an ira so I would not reccomend active trading unless you are doing so in an ira.

Long term investing is not gambling!

Warren buffet own his own company and you can invest in it berkshire hathaway ticker symbol brkb or brka

In your scenario your gain would be larger if you short before the close on Monday. IF you are right. There is typically a large movement in share prices at the open. So if you wait until Tuesday, and the stock does fall you miss out on a big part of the drop.

The disadvantage to shorting on Monday afternoon is that you can't be sure what will happen overnight and the effect on the next day's stock movement. Which makes it more risky. Personally, I only short in real time, when I can see the price action in front of me.

After hours trading may cause a price shift which may be reflected in the next days open. If you monitor AH action, you can use that to validate your assumptions.

You may want to look at Collective2:

http://www.collective2.com

People can subscribe to your system there and you have a number of ways you can charge. One advantage of using them is that you have an independent auditor of your results. Another is that they do all of the billing for you.

Unfortunately, not free.

But even if you decide not to use them, you can still get some idea of what other people are charging for their methods — while seeing what kinds of results they are generating for those charges.

P.S. I hope by "developing a trading strategy for the last 6 months", you don't mean you've been tweaking historical data to generate those results. There have been a few systems on Collective2 that looked great in their presentation of backtest results, but failed miserably going forward.