Day Trading Investment Strategy - How to Beat The Market On Trade Timing

By Peter Skonctue

The average home computer today is millions of times more powerful than the room-sized behemoths of the 1950s. Computing power continues to increase - and computers become more and more affordable every year. This has led to computers being nearly omnipresent in homes and businesses; and of course, computers have completely changed the way that many industries conduct business - and others have been decimated by new technology. There is one economic sector which is still evolving as a result of increasing computing power, a change which has been underway for over a decade now.

This industry is stock and commodity trading. All stock trading relies on trade timing; but success in day trading is particularly dependent on trade timing in order to beat the market. The trader who manages to make the first move will usually make the largest profit on the trade.

Day trading is an especially popular form of trading; the professional day traders who work for financial industry giants often make trades with a leverage of 20:1 or higher. For those unfamiliar with the concept, leverage is the practice of using a loan to purchase shares in the hopes that enough profit will be made on the trade to repay the loan and net some earnings for the trader as well.

Since leverage is one of the causes of the woeful state of the world economy at present, leverage has earned a reputation as being an extremely dangerous thing. Think of leverage as a tool; when used responsibly, it can be very helpful - but used improperly, it can cause serious damage. It all depends how the tool is used. Like a chainsaw, leverage is not inherently dangerous.

It is these kinds of fatal mistakes which has led leveraging and by extension, day trading to acquire a reputation as a dangerous activity. There are of course plenty of other possible investment strategies, such as Warren Buffet's buy and hold approach; most of these strategies take a long term approach with the trader making their profits gradually over time. However, being successful with buy and hold trading relies on a detailed knowledge of the market and the businesses you invest in.

The big change in stock trading is due to the increasing power of computers and their declining cost. The software used to model market behavior and perform market analysis is becoming increasingly sophisticated and at heart, any successful day trader is a pattern analysis geek. What traders are looking for in those charts and analytical tools they use is patterns: patterns of price movements which tell them that a particular investment has a good chance of being profitable. There are now programs known as day trading robots which are making the analytical process much easier, which has opened up the stock market to investors who may not have an extensive background in trading stocks and commodities.

There are traders out there who have an especially entrepreneurial bent who sell subscriptions to email newsletters which provide subscribers with reports that give them access to the analytical prowess of these robots. Most of these newsletters are targeted towards smaller investors and they tend to be focused on penny stocks (also known as the pink sheet market). These newsletters aren't free, but having regular reports from a trader with a solid record of successful trading can be quite valuable indeed.

These can make you a decent amount of money, but like any investor, you should use this as one tool in your arsenal. You want to investigate the businesses being invested in as well as use automated buy-and-sell recommendations from computer software. Also, most of these buy-and-sell recommendations are based on pattern matching of past performance records; this does involve risk, as does any stock investing. - 31876

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