. Day trading is often thought of as risky and no profitable and whilst I can't claim to have always made money from intra-day trading I have had several periods of excellent returns, that I could have only made from this style of trading.
Ultimately it comes down to a numbers game. If you trade daily you can only trade 365 days a year (assuming no weekends/holidays existed). But if you trade intra-day there are 96 5 minute periods duing an 8hr session or 480 1 min periods. This meaning more periods and more opportunity to trade.
Whilst this is not always a good thing, it is often necessary to those who have a low capital outlay. With a low amount of trading capital you simpy can not make enough profit from trading once every few days inn order to make a decent income.
With this you naturally do take on more risk, so how can one protect themselves whilst trading this way? Here are my day trading tips.
1) Don't listen to anyone else-this includes me. You have to make your own choices, good or bad, win or loss.
2) Take a systematic approach. The closer you get to mechanical trading the less room there is for human error.
3) Don't get caught up in all the hype. Don't worry about conspiracies, market manipulation or such like.
4) Don't over trade or rather don't trade for the sake of it.
5) Trade risking less than you can make. Trading with a high risk to reward ratio will severely hamper your chances of success.
6) If something doesn't workadmit it and move on.
7) Even if something is working, keep searching for new ways to trade. You never know when your system/method may stop working.
8) Use stops. Obvious but it is amazing how many people think they can get away without them. Don't.
9) As you are day trading once the day is overforget about itmove on and start afresh tomorrow.
10) Stay focused on what you are doing within your time frame. If someone else is exepecting the market to go down over a 3 day period but you have just been shown a long signal on your indicators then listen to your charts not theirs. If you are wrong so be itmove on. Getting caught up in other peoples time frames will only make your job more difficult.
These are only a few tips, I could go on and on about them. But the reality is I don't have all the answers. Nobody does. You have to trade in away that fullfills your goals. Above are just a few things that were very apparent to me when I was trading at my best.