JLJ

I've had my eye on a particular stock that's tripled in price in the past year or so. It had no P/E for quite a while and now I look back and the P/E is 184 - the average for its industry is 17. Not a good P/E but at least they're finally making money. I'm considering buying some because their price has gone up consistently for the past year or two - it's actually tripled. Should I just forget about buying this (for swing trading) because of this P/E?

thanks! I'll try your suggestion.

I have a clear idea of when to enter, and if the stock or ETF price goes straight up (which rarely happens), it's not hard to know when to get out. But I'm really lost when it comes to setting the stop-loss. Usually the prices waver so much - it seems (to me) quite unpredictable. Either I set the stop loss very cautiously to minimize possible losses - then a minor price drop kicks me out then the price goes right back up so I wish I'd stayed in! OR to prevent that problem, I set the stop loss too low and the price drops and drops and drops and I end up losing money. I'm studying my bad trades and I just can't see a pattern, except that whatever I do (re: setting stop losses) seems to be wrong. I know I have a great deal to learn about technical analysis, problem is I don't know where to start. Thanks for any advice!

Thanks for your input. I really appreciate it. I'll look into Average True Range - don't know what that is but I'll find out. I should probably spend more time reading about technical analysis. And I'll read around this forum about how people decide where to set their stops - there are probably threads devoted just to that! thanks again...

Thanks for your encouragement. I know what I'm doing is pretty simplistic and I expect to add other indicators as I learn about them. I've heard about RSI & stochastic but don't have any idea of how to use them. I know I have a great deal to learn, but I don't know what to read next. (Posts on this forum, for one thing:) This is what I do (stocks or ETF's I'm watching based on the news or what I infer from the news): I buy when the MACD starts to go up fairly sharply, well before it crosses the line. Sometimes I sell when it levels off but because I've observed that it'll often come back up, some times I don't sell until it's definitely dropping - which I can regret it if continues to drop and drop. I think a lot about where to set my stop loss, I'm reluctant to lose too much on one trade, but if I set my stop loss at a 'safe' level then too often I get kicked out prematurely when the price drops - "prematurely" meaning the price often comes right back up, then I wished my stop loss hadn't kicked me out so soon. But after learning from that, I tried setting a much lower stop loss to avoid getting kicked out, and then the price often drops and drops and I lose money. I feel like I'm chasing a moving target. I rarely buy more than 300 shares of anything because I don't know what I"m doing yet. Maybe I ponder too long when deciding whether to buy, The window of opportunity is pretty fleeting, I'm realizing. When I'm watching a stock and I see the MACD and the price going up, I may wait too long. One _could_ get a nice gain on a price increase of only a few cents (assuming you buy enough shares) but only if you act fast. But often I'm sitting there thinking, trying to decide whether to buy, while a few seconds pass. Then I finally buy but I've just missed most of the upswing.This can be profitable only if the price continues to go up, but often it'll drop as soon as I buy, so I lose. Getting in this late will only work if there's a big sustained price increase which I don't often see. Granted buying 300 shares won't get me far on a price increase of a few cents. But I want to know what I'm doing before I buy more. thanks folks for your suggestions!

(Forgive me if this posts twice, I replied earlier today, but I don't see it.) As Yahoo Finance continues to freeze, I'm now mostly using Fidelity's Active Trader Pro. Seems robust to me, but I don't have much a basis for comparison. If you're day trading stocks and ETFs (as I am), what are the differences between different platforms? I wish I could blame my lack of success on my choice of platform, but unfortunately I think it's because I don't know what I'm doing. I listen to the business news, I pick a few stocks (or ETFs) to watch, then I watch the MACD for buy and sell signals - very simple compared to most of you guys here. When paper trading I did very well, but since I began trading with real money (about 2-3 weeks ago), I pretty much stink at this. Fortunately I have a high tolerance for frustration and I'm willing to work, but I have so much to learn I don't know where to begin. Most days, I'm losing money, which wouldn't be so bad if I could figure out what to do differently. Every time i think I figure something out, tomorrow's trading seems to contradict it.

I wish I could blame my learning curve (i.e., losses) on the platform I'm using. I thought it was me. :- ( What's different in a better platform? I just use the MACD, bid/ask, volume, etc. Pretty simplistic, I've just started day trading. It's painfully clear that I don't know what I'm doing. In my 3 weeks of really serious practice trading, I did very well. But since I started using actual money, I'm mostly losing and don't know what to do about it. It's discouraging. I've got a high tolerance for frustration, and I know I have a lot to learn so that's OK - I just wish I knew what/how to learn. I don't want to keep losing money unless I'm learning from my mistakes. Maybe I'm not cut out for day trading? I might do better at swing trading. BTW, if you no longer trade stocks, what are you trading now?

Yes, stocks. I'm very new to this so I'm not comfortable doing futures. BTW, It's occured to me that my internet security software (McAfee) may be causing the problem, because when I open Yahooo Finance, I always get a message basically asking if I want to run a program that may not be safe. Regardless of whether I click "yes" or "no," I get into YahooFinance - then before long, it freezes. I'd thought during market hours that maybe their servers weren't keeping up with the number of users - but I went in on Saturday night and had the same problem.They couldn't be that busy then!

Yahoo Finance is not free, it's $14.95 a month. I'd pay more than that for info that's updated fast enough. Yahoo is updated once a minute, except when it hangs/freezes, which is too often. I looked at freestockcharts and it was so different from what I'm used to that I was intimidated. In Yahoo Finance I can easily see the MACD and the price and the volume, and being a newbie, if I see much more on the screen than that, I get overwhelmed. Please don't laugh. ...OK, if the veterans here laugh I don't blame them. :-)

I mis-typed. I have Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 8 on that machine.

Maybe there's a better way. I use Fidelity's Active Trader Pro for actual trades, but all day I look at the MACD and price trends on Yahoo Finance. Today Yahoo Finance froze repeatedly, on both my machines - one is Vista and I use Firefox, my other computer is brand new, super-fast, with Windows 8 and I use Internet Explorer on that machine. I tried everything - closed and re-opened Yahoo Finance, re-booted both computers, etc. This went on for a couple hours which was scary and frustrating. I set stop-loss orders to protect myself but I would have traded differently had I been able to see the MACD. This occured between 11 am and 1 pm today Maybe it was a problem with Yahoo's servers, but I'm wondering if there's a more reliable way to get this info?

Frank, Thanks so much for your answer. It's so simple. Now I wonder, why the warnings about day traders getting killed on taxes for wash sales?

Newbie question re: Wash sales for day traders. I've just read and re-read the linked articles cited above, and I still don't get it. I keep hearing about how taxes triggered by wash sales can wipe out a day trader's gains. But if it's added to the basis when you re-purchase the same equity, say, tomorrow or next week, what's the problem? Just so you close all those positions before the end of the year (which as a day trader you obviously would), can't you then deduct those losses? If to avoid wash sale tax losses, you cannot trade in the same stocks or ETFs without waiting for 30 (or is it 60?) days to pass, I don't see how you can day trade. There are thousands of potential buys, yes, but there's no time to get to know more than a handful of them really well. So doesn't that mean you'll need to buy and sell some of the same things in a 60 day period?. Doing it in an IRA would sidestep that problem, but everybody says "Don't day trade in your IRA.":confused: Thanks for any advice, and please forgive this newbie if this is a dumb question.

Fidelity told us we are limited to putting 30% of our account into an inverse ETF. Apparently this is because the SEC is trying to protect us from the risk of ETFs, as if we can't figure that out for ourselves. Might other brokers have different rules? I'm hoping.... If not, it's a bummer. I'm new to this, I've only been working in a practice account, but I have done very well with Inverse ETFs. Now I find that I am very limited in what I can do with them.

Hi everyone, so glad I found this place. We just started a month ago doing 'practice trades' in Yahoo Finance (not the same as paper trades, I guess - for one thing, you can set a stop loss order, but if for a millisecond the cost drops to that level, you may not see it so you think you're still in the game). We did very well even as newbies, with "day trading" stocks and ETFs including inverse ETFs. We thought we were ready to do it for real so we called Fidelity to ask if you could day trade in an IRA and the rep said "Yes, people do it all the time." We did our first day of trading, staying of course within the limits or our account - and 2 days later we got a letter from Fidelity that we were suspended for 90 days because we violated the free riding rule! Perhaps if we had a margin account (as opposed to a cash account) this would not have happened?? I'll freely admit that I'm new to this (I didn't know that trades take 3 days to settle :crap: - don't laugh) but it seems odd that the rep at Fidelity whom we spoke to, didn't mention this. So I've been researching and it looks like people generally advise you against day trading in an IRA. But if you do, you need a certain type of IRA that's offered by IB - we should probably never have done any day trading in our Fidelity IRA. But the larger question (don't tell me about the risks of trading with our retirement funds, I know all that) is that I've read that the only way day traders can avoid losing all their gains to wash sale taxes, is to day trade in an IRA. So I don't know what to think. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!