subject: Day Trading Investment Strategy - Beat The Market On Trade Timing [print this page] Computational ability has improved over a billion-fold since the first computers of the 1950s, and they've made pervasive inroads to nearly every aspect of modern life; entire industries have vanished or been transformed because of computers. Another transformation in an industry is underway; it really got its start in the late '90s.
That industry in the midst of a transformation is the stock trading and commodities trading industry. Stock trading, especially day trading, involves trying to beat the market on trade timing. The person who moves first on a trade tends to make the most money.
Day trading is part and parcel for the stock brokerage career, and day traders at big financial firms do trade swings with leverages of 20:1 or more (leverage is taking out a short term loan to buy shares, hoping that the profit on selling them will pay off the loan and its fees).
This kind of leveraging is one of the causes of our current financial crisis - the so called 'toxic assets' problem, but used wisely, leverage is a sensible tool. Think of leverage in investing as being like a chainsaw. You can make very large profits, but one mistake can be quite dangerous.
It's that 'one mistake' viewpoint that causes day trading to have such a hazardous reputation. There are other trading strategies - Warren Buffett famously takes a "buy and hold" strategy, looking for long term growth and reasonable dividend payouts. His strategy requires a lot of in depth knowledge of how specific businesses are run, and a lot of research and investigation.
What's starting to change is that computational power is getting cheap enough, and artificial neural network modeling is getting robust enough, that not only are spam filters getting better, so is the ability to do market segment analysis. Day traders are, in large part, pattern analysis wonks. They're looking for a pattern of prices and movements that indicate that a small investment can become a larger one...and automated tools, called day trading robots, are making those jobs easier.
Some of the more entrepreneurial sorts are selling newsletter subscriptions based on day trading robot reports; these will usually be aimed at the small investor, and are often times centered around the penny sock or pink sheet market. As with any financial information seller, they're going to give you information for a fee, and they're trading on their reputation for making a majority of good trades, usually from some sort of secret pattern matching program.
These can make you a decent amount of money, but like any investor, you should use this as one tool in your arsenal. You want to investigate the businesses being invested in as well as use automated buy-and-sell recommendations from computer software. Also, most of these buy-and-sell recommendations are based on pattern matching of past performance records; this does involve risk, as does any stock investing.
