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Strategies & Market Trends : DAYTRADING Fundamentals -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dan Duchardt who wrote (4161)	9/18/1999 10:10:00 AM
From: TraderAlan	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 18137

Dan, There has always been good instruction on short-term trading techniques. While it often focused on the futures markets, stock traders knew they could apply the principles to their game. The teaching of scalping strategies based on fast execution systems is a relatively new phenomenon. EDT brokers did not invent day trading. Nor was it discovered by the masses who have taken it up as a hobby the last 18 months. Expensive L2 training has always had the taint of being a front to sell you a broker's software system. Scalping was how the principals at these BDs made their living before they bought a brokerage. For most, it's ALL they know so they can't teach anything else. Unfortunately, scalping is the LAST technique that should be taught to a new trader. Forget the quick trigger stuff. Scalping at every level requires a seasoned instinct for how the markets move in waves of buying and selling behavior. New traders need YEARS to comprehend that flow. Success in trading is not about ECNs, SOES, BDs, MMs, etc, etc. It's about buying low and selling high, period. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that this "technique" is easier the longer you hold a stock and harder the shorter you hold it. Most of us who find success in the markets started by investing or position trading, NOT day trading. It's close to suicide to day trade before learning longer hold techniques as position trading teaches you all of the skills that you'll need to know in day trading but at a pace your brain can assimilate them. When day trading, you must apply all that stuff at an accelerated pace. That takes many years of experience for most people. To jump into the day trading game with a lack of seasoned market-based skills acquired through experience is like getting thrown into a meat blender. Think market-wide and not industry-wide. The EDTs are a transitional industry. Their proprietary product is slowly being absorbed into the mainstream. And their extreme business sloppiness has brought some deserved wrath upon them. But they did not invent nor do they control this game or ever will. Newbie traders should seek out classic forms of teaching and training and avoid the video game suicide trap. After you learn how, what and when to buy and sell, the use of software systems becomes so much easier. The natural flow of trading opportunity will have you acting contrary to the ISLD, ARCHIP and SOES order flow which mindlessly chases small shifts in momentum. Alan

To: Dan Duchardt who wrote (4161)	9/18/1999 11:15:00 PM
From: Dave O.	Respond to of 18137

< But in fairness to the many out there who have failed, I think probably most of them were willing to learn. The ones who plunked down the cash for formal instruction > Yes, but instruction is merely the BEGINNING of the process. One doesn't take the 1-2 week course and jump in with the sharks and start trading DELL, INTC, MSFT, YHOO, etc. I like to think of golf as an analogy. One doesn't take a few lessons and go out and play par golf, let alone do it on a course like Pebble Beach. Practice and perseverance are required if one is truly serious about excelling at any given endeavor. I may be wrong, but I think too many beginning traders expect to succeed within months of starting their trading. This is based on observations over the past 3-4 years. Where they get this idea I have no idea. When I think back 20 years ago I certainly wasn't a top notch engineer 3 months after I got my degrees. It was a gradual process of constant learning, in fact, a never ending process. Many of the direct access brokers that "teach" scalping for thousands of dollars are introducing the form of trading that I feel is most likely to result in failure, especially for beginners. And many of these beginners are also relatively new to the market as well so they often don't even consider other trading techniques due to their lack of knowledge. Dave