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

To: jaybiegh who wrote (11001)	12/18/2000 2:36:22 PM
From: Brandon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18137

I would suggest opening an account at IB for the first few months you trade and stick to 50 to 100 shares. That way your expenses will be low. Try to do 2 or 3 trades a day, and consentrate on the setups and the price action, not your p&l's. Throw the books away! With very rare exceptions, there are no good books on trading. If you have 16 of them you have been "taught" a lot of crap. Brandon

To: jaybiegh who wrote (11001)	12/18/2000 3:12:52 PM
From: Dominick	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18137

Let's see if I can add this up: Your 38. plus Your wife's a successful attorney. plus Your allowed to retire. plus You can risk $100k no problem. plus You're looking for some enjoyable challenge. plus You're able to take your time without stress. ------------------------------------------- = I hate you. PS: Welcome to the thread.:)

To: jaybiegh who wrote (11001)	12/18/2000 5:20:54 PM
From: booters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18137

Hello jaybiegh, I think reading the books is OK as long as you do not believe any thing they say. Read them with the idea of using them to familiarize yourself with terminology and broadening your view of the possibilities. You will find after a while that nobody can give you a system you can trade profitably. Not that they are not using it and profiting, but you won't be able to. Trading is way to personal, you must take pieces and parts from all the possibilities and find the method that fits you and your needs. Nobody else's is going to fit you just right. So reading the books can give you an idea of what direction you may or may not like. You can also pick up some ideas you could modify and make your own. Start small regardless of the money you can lose, I do not think profit is the point to begin with. You want to get the feel of the market and the instrument you are trading. You want to find out what you are compfy with. Just sit and watch and absorb. You will be surprised how much you will learn by just doing that while testing little ideas you may have. Good luck, you are starting at a very good time. boots

To: jaybiegh who wrote (11001)	12/18/2000 9:12:58 PM
From: Eric P	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18137

JB, Welcome to the thread! It sure sounds like you have everything together and your head in the right place to tackle trading with a decent chance of success. I would agree with Brandon's suggestion to consider opening an account at Interactive Brokers. They charge commission on a per share basis ($0.01/share), which makes trading very inexpensive for those trading in smaller size. Feel free to ask any questions you may have on the thread, as you'll find everyone to be very helpful and pleasant (most of the time<g>). Good luck, -Eric

To: jaybiegh who wrote (11001)	12/18/2000 10:03:29 PM
From: aldrums	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18137

Jay, It is nice to know there are other new traders out there, for a while I was starting to wonder if I was the only one. Best of luck, Alex

To: jaybiegh who wrote (11001)	12/19/2000 12:07:52 AM
From: Anthony@Pacific	Respond to of 18137

Let me the first to tell you that, if you listen to The ANAL-ists on TV or the touts who pump crappy stocks here....By the way , CNBC and Day Trading are guaranteed vices that will cost you money almost everytime. You and that 100K will part company very quickly ..so be careful and be aware

To: jaybiegh who wrote (11001)	12/19/2000 5:38:54 AM
From: Apakhabar	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 18137

JB, I think LPS5's advice to learn trading with experienced traders at a trading firm is dead-on. Unfortunately that's an option that can be very difficult for some people to take. Even so, the next best thing is to find out-- what are all the things that a novice trader would learn in that environment? Or, how can I as closely as possible emulate the experience of a new trader described by LPS5? Aside from the obvious benefits of working with market-savvy traders, a big advantage working/learning at a trading firm is that you aren't allowed to take big risks: you have people SKEPTICAL of your abilities looking over your shoulder, making sure, for example, you don't take a big position in some small-cap tech company overnight going into earnings. I say skeptical to contrast with unscrupulous brokers that may be encouraging you and giving you false confidence and leading you to take risks you're not ready to take. So it would be very helpful to you if you can manage to find someone to tutor you personally or allow you to watch him or her trade, or both. If this is impossible to arrange then you're going to have to do what I did and that is trade small positions and learn largely on your own (you'll benefit greatly from reading the Thread Summary here). One thing I found helpful was to call up my father at the end of each month and tell him how I did. He has no interest in trading, and in fact thinks it's just gambling. In short he was not encouraging. Yet he understood that my need to be completely honest with somebody was somehow important in learning how to trade because it is vitally important to be accountable. I mean, I never once bothered to tell my dad that "...some market makers manipulated the stock and stole my shares." Can you imagine using this excuse to somebody who thinks the whole enterprise is a house of cards? Of course I had to say simply, after that first month, "Well, I lost eleven thousand dollars. I thought I knew more than I did." I had to be honest because my father has a good bullshit-o-meter, and only by taking full responsibility could I keep his respect. Perhaps I'm not really explaining why this was important to me as far as learning how to trade but it was. It helped me to understand that my success was going to depend entirely on me, and not the bull market, or a bear market or anything about the market at all. Indeed, I've had 44 profitable weeks this year and six losing weeks. I'm not aware of any correlation for my performance to the Nasdaq market (I trade only Nasdaq stocks). It's all me for better and worse. My most profitable months were March (bullish) and April and November (bearish). My worst weeks were in June and September and I don't even recall what the overall market was doing then. I lost over $5000 in each of those weeks and learned that if I get angry while trading I have to stop for the day because I am susceptible to "revenge trading" syndrome and turning a mere bad day into a disaster. November and December have been very bearish but I haven't had a losing day since November 8th and over 95% of my trades have been long. Everything will depend on you. If you can't make money in a down market, that is what it means: YOU can't do that. If you can't average more than $500 day in a raging bull market while your idiot neighbor just made eighty thousand in a week then that's the truth about you. If you get angry like me only once every few months but when you do it costs you five large, that's a fact you want to remember so you can take the rest of those days off. Does anybody here NOT always accept his or her results as being truthful indicators of his or her ability? One year Bill Parcells was asked if he thought his football team was better than their record (5-9 at the time) because they had lost six games by a total of just 14 points. Parcells said, "You know what that tells me? We stink at winning close games." I love that sort of clarity. Parcells never for a moment forgets that the object is winning, and improvement that doesn't in a reasonably fast time lead to winning is just more losing, albeit with a prettier face. In sum, I believe the most valuable thing you would learn trading as an employee for a firm is that every day you will be held accountable and you will not be allowed to deceive yourself. These are IMO prerequisites to reading the market like a successful trader whether you learn with a firm or at home. On a cheerier note, good luck and welcome to this thread!