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

To: scanshift who wrote (4243)	9/20/1999 1:16:00 AM
From: ig	Respond to of 18137

Interesting Questions I've been trading for only two years, so my "system" is still constantly being tweaked. I have a small repertoire of patterns that work for me, but I am still adding to them. My goal at this point is not to maximize profits using what little I know, it is to learn what I can about trading and let the profits follow. The priorities of the info I monitor vary according to the time of day. At the open, if I have any overnight positions, then of course I am watching Time & Sales for those issues very closely. If I have no overnight positions to exit, then I am assessing the mood of the market and scanning for plays that fit the mood. (The strategies and mechanisms for playing the open are too numerous to list here.) Most of the large waves of predictable buying and selling are finished by the end of the first two hours. After that, as the waves subside into equilibrium, their magnitude becomes too small for me to play. Then, I am looking for fresh news plays. Ask me again in a few years and I'll probably have a less abstract, more quantified answer for you. (In fact, you have given me a good notion about it just by asking the question. Thank you.) At this point, my way of monitoring information is just not very systematic. I try new things all the time. My latest study is how to best exit a profitable trade. I've been playing around with the Parabolic Trailing Stop as described by Elder. I tried Pristine's system for several weeks, but wasn't happy with my results. I always seem to be zigging when I should be zagging -- selling too soon or selling too late. The tools I am using at this time are Qcharts, WebBroker, and private network of real-time newswires. Whenever I am not actually in a trade, I will drop everything for a hot news alert. In between news alerts I am scanning the market with various Qcharts Hotlists; in particular, with Trade Rate and Unusual Volume. My next study will be to learn how to use a relational database to analyze my trades. I want to know which times of day have been most successful for me, what kinds of trades have been most successful, what has been the #1 reason for my losses, etc. I am very excited about learning how to do this. ig