Search results

What I meant was that a huge edge in day trading is that you can select a stock which has just pre-announced or been served with a huge lawsuit or surprised on earnings. You usually don't know things like that the night before.

If you select the stocks and directions the night before, then you give up a daytrader's edge.

What can I say? I went to a Catholic school.

I believe selling premium will make you a lot of money. You might want to consider selling puts instead of selling calls and buying the underlying. It's quicker, easier, and should incur a lower commission cost. Buying a stock on the first day of a big selloff. It's just not worth it (in...

You cannot overstate the importance of this fact.

Very interesting. I started in a very similar way, but after a couple of weeks of slow bleed I gave up.

While reading the first three pages of this thread, I kept thinking to myself, This is very interesting. For some reason or another this guy has over a million bucks to play with, and is actually doing it, yet he seems to be making the very mistakes I used to make before I became profitable...

Sorry I can't help you with your questions, but welcome to the club. The club of fools who have spent the first two decades of their lives pleasing their teachers so that they could become good followers in a big organization. I made the same mistake, if you can call it that.

Price and volume.

When I was a very bad electronic daytrader, I used to resent never having seen any trading floor in person. Now that I think about it: I don't like to meet people face to face. I don't go out for fun, try to do everything over the internet, I am even uncomfortable talking to people on the...

I'm not sure about "realistic targets", but I'm afraid keeping stops is not all that easy. It's not like you just flip a switch and become a profitable trader. The most difficult aspect, especially with 2 to 4 point stops, is how to find the right level for your stop and how to execute it...

I wholeheartedly agree with both above posts. I know from my own experience that this kind of problem (lack of discipline due to emotion) is very much aggravated if you focus on only one instrument. As a matter of fact, I would go so far as to suggest that you trade several different stocks...

Nicely said, but I am not yet sure I agree.

Let me ask you this: Rather than finding a stock which you don't expect to make any huge moves and enveloping it, why not just find a big gainer and put only the buy portion of the envelope in, and find a big losing stock for the sell portion?

While you are here, def, I am assuming once BOX gets started, there won't be any order modification fees for orders routed there. Is that correct?

Of course not. Just like you don't think about the $2 fee when you use an ATM or the $9.95 when you buy a coffee at Starbucks. But that doesn't mean there isn't somebody else who thinks about the money. But then again, wars don't really have money as their ultimate reason. Hitler or Bush...

And --- I believe it is pronounced --- Tallyho!

I agree. Maybe my situation is more typical than I thought: I stopped losing money after a couple of months, but I didn't start making money for more than a year after that.

From then on, I traded mostly 100 share lots. I try to avoid a situation in which I would "have to" use a market order altogether. If it happens, I submit a marketable limit order. On a stock like MMM it might be more than $0.50 away from the best price. It was one of those "discount...

Of course it was MMM, since you are expressing it in pennies and not as a percentage (and you are not trading BRK.A). The worst market order fill I ever got was in August of 2001 around 9:32 Eastern when trying to buy about 1500 shares of ORCL. It was about $0.90 away from the market price...