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praetorian, I wish you much luck and success with your position, but I must say that it sounds to me like you're doing nothing more than placing a bet on what you think the market will do, rather than trading what the market actually gives you and does. To my thinking, that's a dangerous...

Regarding stops, it depends upon whether you're watching the stock in real time or you enter a trade and leave it unattended. I personally monitor my trades in real time, and therefore don't actually enter stop orders, they're simply mental stops that are triggered by the stock's movement. So...

I for one certainly won't be trading much of anything tomorrow, not so much because I'm worried about an out and out crash, but because everyone will be staying on the sidelines waiting for Greenspan on Tuesday. For that same reason, I tend to disagree that tomorrow would be a major move in...

That's a pretty wide open question. First, this discussion assumes that you've become proficient at trading the long side of stocks (i.e. proper stop management, risk/reward prospects, chart analysis). If so, then trading the short side is exactly the same, just in reverse. Based upon your...

I agree with mgregor. I personally trade from home using a $50K account, and have done so for almost two years now. While I certainly had my "learning curve" at the beginning and had to make up the losses, I consistently pull profits from the market, and as long as you stick to your stop...

steven9 is correct. Whatever money comes from the sale of an overnight position, whether it includes a profit, loss, or break even is unavailable in its entirety to use for daytrading in that same stock. Of course you can still use your entire buying power, including whatever profits you may...

Mgregor is pretty much correct regarding the daytrading rule. However, it should be pointed out that this trading call occurs in this situation <b>only</b> if you attempt to trade the following day using more buying power than you would have minus the value of the overnight position. So for...

mgregor, I wasn't necessarily advocating taking positions home overnight. In your CHKP example, you mentioned that the stock hit a low around 63 during the day that you entered the trade. What I was referring to was the idea of simply trailing a liberal stop, and if you haven't been stopped...

Volunteer, There is a "Pending" page in the Trader Workstation that displays your open orders. So if you log off and log back on, your Pending page will come up first showing your orders still open. Since I don't often leave open orders unattended, I can't accurately comment on the...

Jeffrey, Regarding how much capital I allocate to a position, it varies, but often doesn't exceed 30% of my total buying power (i.e. $30,000). However, if a trade is continuing to go my way I may add to the position and use a little more of my account to augment the position. I also don't...

mgregor, The way I personally trade (which follows Tony's strategy) is that I have a price target at which point I sell half or part of my position. The rest I let ride with a trailing stop. So in your case with CHKP, assuming it didn't do a big wiggle back up and/or your trailing stop...

Don't go by the demo in terms of usefulness and stability. Since quotes and trades in the demo are "mock" so to speak, they're not reliable in terms of how well the real trading is. The demo I believe is mainly to help get you accustomed to the layout and functions. You may notice in the demo...

I personally trade with a constant balance of $50,000. All profits I make every week are swept out of my account either as a check from my broker or a wire transfer. With margin I have $100,000 worth of buying power, but I rarely use all of it. I'm able to trade whatever I like quite...

This can be interpreted in a couple ways. One is that there is rotation going on, and it pays to be short the index or stocks of the index that is down and/or long the index that is up. The other is that one index is making a move and will quite possibly soon drag the other index in the...

mgregor, Regarding brokers, I personally do use Interactive Brokers, and have had no real problems, at least no more often than I did with other brokerages. However, if you want to stick with a Realtick broker, there are several out there that have better commissions than MB, especially for...

Regarding pre-market support/resistance breaches, it's a bit of a gray area, although I am inclined to consider the levels still valid if the actual open is back above support, with a caveat (see below). The reasoning behind it is that pre-market trades are not included on most charts that the...

mgregor, I didn't have time to check all of the charts for your stocks, but checking your analysis of CHKP looks good to me. Being that the time frames to hold your trades is probably shorter now, I would pay more attention to the short term support/resistance levels you determined than the...

mgregor, I use plain old fashioned chart patterns and trend lines to determine my swing trades. For instance, on JNPR which I have done the majority of my trading, its chart shows it in a descending channel. On Feb 26, JNPR hit the upper boundary of the channel, which also coincided with...

white17, You bring up a good point, namely the contrarian aspect of all of this. When the media and people in general talk about how terrible things are, that's usually when things turn around, just as when everyone was saying how great things were, it was the death knell for the market...

I agree that long term the US, and therefore the world economy is bleak. We've continued to overspend and not worry about "tomorrow" for way too long. However, I disagree that only tech is suffering now. Old line companies like Whirlpool and others have announced layoffs and earnings warnings...