The Ultimate Day Trader: How to Achieve Consistent Day Trading Profits in Stocks, Forex, and Commodities

The Ultimate Day Trader attempts to accomplish the following seven goals, with many more features and explanations along the way:

• Give you an overview of the issues and obstacles that must be overcome in order to be consistently profitable as a day trader in stocks and/or futures
• Provide you with objective, concise, and reliable trading methodologies to help you achieve trading profits in the single day time frame
• Provide you with the necessary trading structure or model to facilitate the application of trading tools
• Give you the rules necessary to minimize risk and to maximize profits
• Show you how to select the best market candidates for day trading
• Discuss the dos and don’ts of electronic order entry
• Show you how to diversify your day trading portfolio to minimize periods of drawdown and improve stability of performance

Author’s Note:

I should start right off by warning you that this book is not designed for the first-time day trader. My purpose in The Ultimate Day Trader is to introduce not just specific trading methodologies and techniques but also a guiding philosophy and thought process for how to use them. From that base I also discuss more generalized philosophy and pragmatics about being a trader, from start to finish of the trading day, week and month; in short, your life as a day trader. While these concepts certainly apply to the novice trader, they will be much easier to grasp for someone who has had some day trading experience. A true beginner at day trading might be better served to pick up a copy of A Beginner’s Guide to Day Trading Online by Toni Turner.

As I enter my fourth decade in the markets as a trader, analyst, author, educator, and trading system developer, I find that while some aspects of trading have grown by leaps and bounds other areas have barely advanced. Indeed, the weakest link in the chain remains the trader. It is a sad but true fact of market life that even the most profitable trading systems and methods will, in the hands of an undisciplined trader, be rendered worthless or even dangerous. I liken the situation to that of a high-powered, high performance-racing vehicle being piloted by an inexperienced driver. The results can be, and most often are, catastrophic. In preparing to write this book, I have asked myself some questions:

• What can be done to improve the lot of the average trader?
• Are the solutions to this dilemma to be found in more education, psychiatry, faster computers, better software, better systems, or a combination of the above?
• Do better systems create better traders?
• Is the ability to trade profitably innate or can it be learned?
• Is day trading the best way to succeed in the markets, or is investing the true key to consistent profits?

I have made my best attempt to answer these and other essential questions in this book. Beyond that, I have other reasons for putting this book together:

• To provide an overview of the day trading spectrum within the context of changes that have taken place since 1997 when I authored The Compleat Day Trader.
• To introduce new day trading methods that are applicable to today’s more volatile and dynamic markets
• To teach order entry strategies designed to vastly improve the odds of success
• To show you how to prevent careless but costly errors when using electronic trading platforms
• To present, discuss, and provide a detailed profit maximizing strategy for each of the strategies I have developed
• To illustrate all strategies clearly, visually, and with detailed examples
• To disclose all of the risks that are inherent in day trading
• To explore potentially new avenues and methods of day trading

I will do all these things, providing detailed illustrations, rules, and a summary of the good and bad points associated with each method I explain. While I cannot guarantee these methods will work as well in the future as they have in the past, I do believe that, at the very minimum, they will provide you with solid rules, objective methodologies, and directions for integration with the work you may currently be doing in the markets.

Contents:

• Definitions and Directions—What It Means to Day Trade Today
• The Need for Methods
• An Overview of Day Trading Markets and Methods
• The Importance of Structure and the STF Framework
• Gap Day Trading
• The Moving Average Channel with Confirmation Trend and Channel Trading
• Day Trading By the Day
• Volume Spikes and Their Use in Day Trading
• Day Trading With Divergences: Set-Up
• Day Trading with Divergence: Momentum Timing Triggers
• Day Trading With Divergence: Follow-Through
• The Stochastic “POP” Method
• The Trend Breakout Method
• Trading in a News-Driven Market
• Exit Strategies
• The Pragmatics of Day Trading
• Putting It All Together
• Ten Cardinal Rules of Day Trading

The Ultimate Day Trader: How to Achieve Consistent Day Trading Profits in Stocks, Forex, and Commodities By Jacob Bernstein (Jake Bernstein) pdf