SoYou Want To Become A DayTrader(Or Not?)

How to (not) DayTrade So you'd like to earn your living DayTrading? You have all heard the stories of losing DayTraders running down the streets shooting people? During the heady .com days prior to 2001, (when Bush became president,) there were stocks, 3 or 4 times a week that went up from 30 to 200% a day. It was possible, if you knew what you were doing, to check before the market opened to see which stocks were running in real time and why. And, if you then had a fast electronic brokerage system you could dive into the market, buy a bunch and sell them the same day. About 1% of people doing this consistently made money. I saw one private individual make a million in one day shorting Corel. And then there was somebody who lost a bunch hanging on too long to the WWWF IPO. As a matter of fact the bottom line is that if you take inflation into account you'd have been better off putting your money in an old sock since 2001. So what to do? Give up on the Stock Market let alone give up on DayTrading? Don't give up on the Stock Market, if you use the right system which is a simple set of formulas you can still make 30% or more on your money annually. Using this simple system $11,000 left in the market for 17 years would be worth more than one million dollars today. But it is not DayTrading and you still would need a strong stomach to sit out these 17 years, because some of those years would give you negative returns. The bottom line is this; if you want to DayTrade there is only one way to do this today. And that is with MINDBLOWING News. MINDBLOWING News along the lines of: XYZ corporation finds cure for cancer. ABC Inc invents Eternal Life Pill DreamCar Corp invents car that runs on water. You get the idea. And then I am going to use another qualifier: You should get this news BEFORE most other people get it. How to do this: For about $10 a month you can get a subscription to real-time market news. Get your Real Time Market News at about 6 AM Eastern Standard Time. Say you find the real time news that a company has invented a car that runs on water. Check the time the news was first released, making sure that news item was not available yesterday. Buy the stock now with money that you can afford to burn ALWAYS USING A STOP LOSS. Most electronic brokerage firms today allow you to buy stocks on NASDAQ only as early as 6 AM EST. Sell the stock at 9.28 AM EST to all the traders that are waking up. You could conceivably double your money. So would you then trade again in this stock after the market opens officially? No,I would not. Too many mindgames will be played by market makers during the first day with the stock that produced the mindblowing news. Remember the statement above: "There have been very few days since 2001 that any stocks actually went up more than 30% in one day, the oomph has disappeared from both the Nasdaq and the Dow." Never hold the mind blowing news stock overnight, because people in most cases will dump it on the second day. One more tip: Never buy IPO's on the first day. The most touted IPO(meaning almost all large brokerage houses were praising this IPO to the sky) cost people the most in decreased value on the second day after the IPO came out. Who were the winners? The brokerage houses. So, if you have money to burn, have a cast iron stomach and want to watch market news from 6 AM to 9.28 AM EST, DayTrading may be for you.