Day Trading – An Especially Popular Form of Trading
March 14th, 2010
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The average home computer today is millions of times more powerful than the room-sized behemoths of the 1950s. Computing power continues to increase – and computers become more and more affordable every year. This has led to computers being nearly omnipresent in homes and businesses; and of course, computers have completely changed the way that many industries conduct business – and others have been decimated by new technology. There is one economic sector which is still evolving as a result of increasing computing power, a change which has been underway for over a decade now.
That industry in the midst of a transformation is the stock trading and commodities trading industry. Stock trading, especially day trading, involves trying to beat the market on trade timing. The person who moves first on a trade tends to make the most money.
Day trading is part and parcel for the stock brokerage career, and day traders at big financial firms do trade swings with leverages of 20:1 or more (leverage is taking out a short term loan to buy shares, hoping that the profit on selling them will pay off the loan and its fees).
Leverage has acquired something of a bad reputation as of late; on a very large scale, leveraging is among the factors responsible for the current economic slump and credit crunch. However, leverage can be used responsibly in day trading; it’s a tool and like many tools, it can either be useful or incredibly dangerous depending on how it is used.
It’s that ‘one mistake’ viewpoint that causes day trading to have such a hazardous reputation. There are other trading strategies – Warren Buffett famously takes a “buy and hold” strategy, looking for long term growth and reasonable dividend payouts. His strategy requires a lot of in depth knowledge of how specific businesses are run, and a lot of research and investigation.
The big change in stock trading is due to the increasing power of computers and their declining cost. The software used to model market behavior and perform market analysis is becoming increasingly sophisticated and at heart, any successful day trader is a pattern analysis geek. What traders are looking for in those charts and analytical tools they use is patterns: patterns of price movements which tell them that a particular investment has a good chance of being profitable. There are now programs known as day trading robots which are making the analytical process much easier, which has opened up the stock market to investors who may not have an extensive background in trading stocks and commodities.
There are traders out there who have an especially entrepreneurial bent who sell subscriptions to email newsletters which provide subscribers with reports that give them access to the analytical prowess of these robots. Most of these newsletters are targeted towards smaller investors and they tend to be focused on penny stocks (also known as the pink sheet market). These newsletters aren’t free, but having regular reports from a trader with a solid record of successful trading can be quite valuable indeed.
These can make you a decent amount of money, but like any investor, you should use this as one tool in your arsenal. You want to investigate the businesses being invested in as well as use automated buy-and-sell recommendations from computer software. Also, most of these buy-and-sell recommendations are based on pattern matching of past performance records; this does involve risk, as does any stock investing.
Are you tired of scraping by at your day job? Why not get into the stock trading and make some money the easy way… with the guidance of artificial intelligence! Learn more about how to make money trading now. You can also check trading for a living info.
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