Day Trading For Dummies, is for people who are looking for a new business or who simply want to supplement their investment returns with new techniques. In this book you can find all the information you need to determine whether you’re cut out for day trading, to lay out your home office, to research and plan trades, and more. And even if you decide day trading isn’t for you, you can still find lots of sound general advice about markets, trading, and investing strategies that you can benefit from. Plus you’ll have saved all the money you would have otherwise invested on research and training, not to mention the trading losses!
Introduction:
First, let me tell you what this book is not: It’s not a textbook, and it’s not a handbook for professional investors. Several of those are on the market already, and they’re fabulous, but they’re often dry and assume you already have a lot of knowledge about day trading. This book doesn’t make those assumptions. It contains straightforward explanations of how day trading works, how to get started, what the pitfalls are, and what some of the alternatives are for your portfolio and for your career. It’s designed for you to be able to skip around and read the chapters or sections that interest you, without having to read every word that comes before them.
This book has more than enough content to get you started — or to guide you to something that’s a better fit for your sensibilities. If you really want to read some textbooks, I list a few in the appendix. Oh, and I like to think this book isn’t dry, either. As for conventions, here are the basics: I put important words that I define in italics. I often bold the key words of lists to bring the important ideas to your attention. And I place all web addresses in monofont to set them apart. During printing of this book, some of the web addresses may have broken across two lines of text. If you come across such an address, rest assured that I haven’t put in any extra characters (such as hyphens) to indicate the break. When using a broken web address, type in exactly what you see on the page, pretending that the line break doesn’t exist.
I also include sidebars in the book that you don’t really need to read in order to follow the chapter text. With that stated, though, I do encourage you to go back and read through this extra material when you have the time. Many of the sidebars contain practice examples that help you get an even better idea of how some of the investment concepts work. Some of the information is pretty fun, too.
Day trading is a business in which you use real money to take on the markets. If you love the thrill of the markets and have the patience to sit and stare at a screen for hours, waiting for the right moment to get in and get out of securities, then day trading may be a great career option. But it has risks, too. Any day can be your best day, but it can also put you out of business forever. For that reason, day trading requires the right psychological makeup. Good day traders are patient and decisive, confident but not arrogant. They most certainly are not gamblers, although day trading attracts gamblers who discover it’s a great way to lose money from home.
Contents:
- So You Want to Be a Day Trader
- Planning to Succeed As a Day Trader
- Deciding What to Trade and How to Trade It
- Defining Trading: Risk, Reward, and T iming
- Regulation and the Modern Trader
- Managing Your Money and Positions
- Technical Analysis 101
- Following Market Indicators and Tried-and-True Day-Trading Strategies
- Increasing Risk and Potential Return with Short Selling and Leverage
- Looking for Easy Profits: Navigating the Tricky World of Arbitrage and High-Frequency Trading
- All About Accounts
- Equipping to Day Trade
- Researching Research Services
- Stress Management in the Trading Day
- Taxes for Traders
- But Did You Make Money? Testing, Tracking, and Evaluating Performance
- Day Trading for Investors
- Ten Good Reasons to Day Trade
- Ten or So Good Reasons to Avoid Day Trading
- Ten Common Day-Trading Mistakes
- Ten Tested Money-Management Techniques
