How To Day Trade

Day Trading Definition

Day trading is by definition when you enter and exit a trade on the same trading day. Often people misuse the expression to mean short term trading which can be anything from a few days to a few weeks or months. This however is not day trading, it is short term trading. A day trade takes anything from a few minutes to several hours … ie the length of the market session plus any pre-market and post-market executions.

In order to day trade you need an online trading platform like eToro for forex or eTrade for stocks. You can use a broker but as an element of day trading (in addition to same day closure) is doing more than one trade in any one session, using a broker becomes impractical. Some day traders (myself included) often make several trades in one day, all of them in and out in the same session.

What is Day Trading

In day trading you need to make small size trades using high liquidity stocks. This is so that you can get in and out very quickly as day trading is a form of scalping when you shave small amounts of profit off small price movements.

To use a broker when you day trade like that would mean calling the broker several times in an hour and asking him to prioritize your order ahead of everyone else’s. You can imagine how happy he would be about that, notwithstanding his ability to be able to actually carry them out as required.

Day Trading Strategies

There are several base strategies you can use while day trading. The thousands you can read about are all off-springs of the originals. We won’t go into each of those base day trading strategies in this article, however you can read about one of the favorites in the ‘Day Trading Stocks At Market Open‘ article on this site.

Provided you have a trading platform, making a day trade is not different to executing a normal trade. You enter the trade and then some time later you exit the trade. The only difference between the day trade and the ‘normal’ trade is the length of time between entering and exiting.
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