itcdr

Have made 20 trades (buy & sell) since starting 6 months ago. Most I've lost in a trade is $70. Most I've gained is $300. average around $60 profit per trade. Have only done regular trades. Selling short seemed too risky. Have traded when the market was way up and way down. Example, I bought & sold 'LVS' when it was around $8 and then again when it was down to $2 and again now when up to $10. Obviously I wish I would have kept it when I bought at $2 but had no way of knowing would come up that much. A friend of mine bought LVS with me at the beginning at $8 and just kept it till now. I made much more with making the little profits each trade so I figure it's best not to get too greedy and not to think what if's. Right now it feels much too simple though. Is there more I should learn first before going with bigger trade amounts? Other tools I should be using? How do the pro's do it?

Thanks for the quick replies. Sorry. should have been more specific. By a stock looking good meant: Examples: Watched a stock's price for a week or so. If it appears to be consistently improving and then a news report just announces an expansion for the company then I'd buy and put LIMIT order to sell when it goes up around 10% or so. Or company releases a bad earnings report causing the stock price to tank. When it looks to be at it's lowest will buy and then wait for a quick rise of 10% or so to sell. Or a stocks price has been stable for a while. Will then use the high and lows average to set up an automatic order to try and buy at the lowest of the day and sell at the highest. So am I adding logic to it, but I feel like there should be a lot more to the game then reading the news and looking at historical prices for a stock.

Just joined this forum and looking to get more involved in the trading world. Today I just hit the $1,000 profit mark, which has given me the motivation to take things to the next level I am an experienced programmer, which allows me to work from home and set my own hours. About 6 months ago I started looking into trading stocks as the economic crisis had started seriously affect my business. Here's what I've been doing. I setup an account at tradeking.com with $2K and used google.com/finance to keep track of a couple dozen tech and casino stocks for companies I was familiar with. I watched the prices and read the news reports on google finance. Every once in a while I'd make an automated trade when a stock looked good. Keeping it for about 1-3 days on average until it executed based on a LIMIT order. I usually only put up about $400-800 per trade and tried to get a 10% return. It seemed to work. Looking back I have now made 20 trades (buy & sell) since the beginning 6 months ago. Only 3 did I have a loss as the stock didn't look like it was going back up. And now I have just over $3K in my trading account ($1,000 profit after losses and fees). So have I been lucky or am I on the right path? I plan to put another thousand or so in my trading account and start doing bigger trades. Before that though I want to get more familiar with what I'm doing. Any advice on where to go from here? Must read guides, better tools I should use, etc.? I really don't know much of the terminology or anything more than the basics yet. I'm just going off news reports and previous highs and lows - Chris