BrianE

Success at Day Trading is now determined the same as it always was. 1. Fast, accurate moves in and out of the market. 2. Management of risk and reward. 3. Discipline to follow the previous two points.

If you're moving around a lot, what more do you need, other than a laptop? Why get into the costly infrastructure before you have a positive expectancy system? Design, backtest, forward test, pilot - then host.

If you don't track it, it didn't happen. I find that writing in a trading journal and reading from it to do my daily analysis of success and failure is a great step towards treating this "game" as a business. You can't keep much more than 7 active things in your mind at the same time, so use that expensive resource to work your plan, rather than trying to remember what you did.

Still sounds like a cart and horse issue. WHEN you have a system with a positive expectation and you can get it to make sufficient trades, use some of your profits to establish a safe back office and let it run there. Until you get to this plateau, spend all of your knowledge capital on getting your system to that state.

The post was yesterday. MightyMouse joined in 2008.

I don't know if it's dead, but it sure seems to be a tough way to make a living.

One key with day trading is focus. If your basket of target stocks is too big, then you spend a lot of time looking and not so much doing. I have heard that getting a 'feel' for how the stock moves is a great idea. With a big group of targets, you won't be able to get that feel. Think about picking a single emini or a forex pair to look at and use to check out your system.

Using established support and resistance locations will give a good starting point for a simple system. Getting a consistent cash flow from a trading system will definitely involve managing yur trades properly. Don't 'bet' too much of your account (2% is a good number that I have heard from a lot of traders). Cut your losers short, fast. Let your winner run long.