You are a lucky dude. You are here to learn, and you are being honest, posting your trades, and asking for help. I'll answer your MACD, momentum, and RSI questions in a second.
There are a lot of people here that are willing to help you. You're a bit like "Everytrader" if you will pardon the bad metaphor.
Everything I write is my own personal opinion. You gotta remember that everyone is different, and what works for me may not work for you. What works for you may not be my cup of Sleepytime.
This is the main reason why it's really tough to write a book on "How to Be a Successful Day Trader. I could do it; I write about the stock market all the time, I've been studying T/A for about 14 years, and I have a trading strategy that works really well for me. But telling someone else to do something very specific is taking a chance that you're telling him to ignore something; something that he could do to become successful at trading.
In other words, my basic philosophy is "If it Works, Do It." If you make money by stepping outside and talking to the lawnmower prior to a trade, then dude, that's the winning strategy. Unfortunately, it may not work for the guy who is buying your book. I think some guys write books because they need money to play the market and can't make the money trading.
Take the twistoid in Atlanta, for example. I could see it. I predicted the moment it happened that the press would have a field day with day trading. The press would play this like you would play Heather Kozar on the third date. (I myself would write a book about ONE date with Heather Kozar, but I digress.) The press just jumped all over this story; day trading is gambling, the man cracked from the pressure, we need to regulate this stuff, it's dangerous, blah blah blah.
These nimrods in the press are out for one thing: ratings. The truth is that that dude beat his wife to death with a baseball bat, and then he did the same thing to her mother. That's our first clue; the dude is an evil twisted f***. Good clue. THEN he gets away with it, and THEN he collects almost half a million bucks in insurance money for his Dirty Deed. Clue #2. Is this in the CNBC story? Uh.....no. Then years go by, this freak marries another woman, moves to a different state, finds out about day trading, and then loses a hundred large. He screwed up. He didn't learn how to do it. The pros took his money. Welcome to Earth.
Dan Rather fails to ask if maybe he would not have been day trading at all if he didn't have four hundred grand from beating two women to death with a damn baseball bat. THEN the dude feels bad about his losses, and figures his kids can't live with the shame, so he beats them to death and then he beats his fresh new wife to death and THEN he drives over to the day trading center and makes the national news at the expense of some very unfortunate people that were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Day trading had nothing to do with it. Nothing. The dude was a sick evil pussbucket way before he ever found out about day trading. He was a gambler. He didn't bother to learn how to do it. Then, when he lost his money to somebody who DID know how, his conclusion was that it wasn't his fault. No law on Earth can stop somebody from "not being responsible for losing one hundred thousand dollars that was collected for beating people to death with a blunt instrument".
Basic rule: if you can't be responsible for you losses, then don't trade stocks. If my satellite feed goes down in the middle of the trade, it's my fault, I exit the trade. I don't grab my 9mm and try to find the cable guy. If some cowboy in Arizona misses a coyote with his hunting rifle and hits the telephone line I'm trading on and I lose my ISP in Maryland, it's my fault, I exit the trade. Simple. Very simple. I control the vertical. I control the horizontal.
So how do you learn how to day trade? Books are a good way. I've read them all. The ones I don't like are the 'psychological' books. They get into a bunch of horse manure about feelings and ideas and thoughts and emotions and when you were a baby and your dad yelled at you and you cried. That crap just blows chunks. The truth is that some people can do it, some can't, and if you can't it doesn't mean you have a tiny weenie or acne, or that you'll have trouble getting a date or ordering at a restaurant. It just means maybe you should be position trading or playing bonds or wheat or pork bellies or mutual funds or Roman coins or Golden Age comic books instead.
"E-Trade Sucks"? No, my friend, you suck because you placed an order and then let it get away from you and you didn't have a Backup Plan in case Aliens Attacked Washington in the middle of your trade, and another Backup Plan #2 if Backup Plan #1 didn't work. I have had to use my Backup Plan #2 one time. One time in my life. And it saved me some money.
Lots of people like this guy Elder's book about trading. He's a psychiatrist. I read the book, even though no psychiatrists will ever be invited to my birthday party. The book is worth the money. Not for what he writes, which is total nonsense from start to finish, but for one single page.
On that one page, I saw a chart pattern that it took me two years to figure out on my own. I was actually pissed off when I saw it in his book, because it took me two years to see, and he snagged it from somebody and put it in his book.
The two best books I've ever read on Technical Analysis are "Point and Figure Charting" by Tom Dorsey, and "The New Science of Technical Analysis" by Thomas DeMark. Use what makes sense, and don't use what does not make sense.
MACD is a great filter. One of the best. Momentum is something that I have not had a lot of success with. Welle's Wilders' RSI is killer. That man really had his feces together, that filter works really well for me. I studied it from the one minute bar up to the weekly chart, and periods from 3 to 50. Just so you may not have to do the same, I'll tell you that 13 period and 14 period seem to work pretty well. But you have to be able to see the patterns.
I've posted publicly my favorite RSI pattern, which somebody else somewhere else probably figured out too. I call it the "double hump".(I don't know why, maybe Elder has a stupid theory that I can laugh at.) I'll give it to you, but you'll have to do the homework, I'm not going to show you a chart and play Kindergarten teacher with ya, like should you be looking at a 5 minute bar or a daily chart.
Look for divergences. If you want to go long, look for a specific spot where the stock does a 'double dip'; a bottom, a move up, and then a lower bottom. Line that up with your RSI. (You'll have to figure out what period you think works best, and whether or not both RSI lows have to be less than 30 on the RSI chart, stuff like that.)
Look for a higher "second low" on the RSI in conjunction with that lower "second low" on the price chart. It might be a clue that the stock is less weak than it appears on the price chart and is due for a move up. Works on stochastic too.
That was fun. Now I'll have some breakfast.
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