The Truth About Day Trading Stocks: A Cautionary Tale About Hard Challenges and What It Takes To Succeed
The Truth About Day Trading Stocks shows how trading decisions are bent and shaped by emotions. Day-trading is a psychological process. Day-trading is emotional. Anyone can learn how to research and scrutinize fundamental business data. Anyone can master chart pattern analysis. But in the end the execution of an actual real-time order is all that really matters. That’s why feelings take over.
Author’s Introduction:
The purpose of The Truth About Day Trading Stocks is to caution, and to some degree reprogram, the na¨ıve, heedless amateur day-trader. I want to prevent beginners from watching their money disappear. In this book, I offer the amateur day-trader, a candid account of the challenges I’ve encountered while developing in the profession. By candid I mean brutally truthful, mostly about myself, mostly with the side-splitting laughter that the distance of hindsight provides!
I designed this book not only as an escape from dry tedious texts, a ramble down Easy Read Lane, but also as a reference tool for serious daytrading careerists. If you approach this tome as a tool, you may be inclined to pick only the passages that address your most pressing questions. I feel that I should warn you not to do that. You should read the chapters in order. Later chapters build on ideas presented in earlier chapters, and if you skip around, the ideas may not gel.
Contents:
- Truths about Yourself to Know First
- How Emotions Can Destroy a Trade
- Preventing Overconfidence
- From Impatient to Cool, Calm, and Collected
- Taking Breaks
- The Importance of Risk Management
- Why Overexposure to the Market Can Hurt
- Budgeting: Knowing Your Financial Limitations
- Minimizing Your Risk with Stop/Loss
- Averaging-Down: A Skilled Strategy
- Gambling versus Day Trading
- Why Some Traders Make More Mistakes
- Trading Consistently All Day
- Stock Picking: Simplifying the Process
- Why News Can Be Just Noise
- About Those Training Programs
- Picking the Right Online Broker: Pay-per-Share versus Pay-per-Trade
- Paper-Trading Strategy
- Trading for Skill versus Trading for Income
- The Perfect Trading Day
- The Worst Trading Day