Welcome back!
stock trading always seems to attract attention of a lot of people, because if you are good at it, you can really make a lot of money. There are stories in the news all the time about star traders getting large bonuses, getting promoted, or just living a lavish lifestyle. How does one learn to day trade in the first place, if you have very little training? After all, even the top traders had to learn somewhere.
One of the first things you should do when you want to learn day trading is to read as many books as you can. There are many, many of them on Amazon, and other specialty traders websites. It is not necessary to spend huge amounts of money buying stuff that costs well into the hundreds of dollars. Many people fall into the trap of trying to “accelerate” the learning by just skipping ahead and buying someones stock trading, thinking they can just master it that way. You need to start at the basics. Get a book on how to read charts. Read it. Now read it again and again.
If you are going to be a trader, the MOST IMPORTANT ability you will have is in assessing a chart in real time. This is supply and demand, and its what you will base your decisions on (there is of course more to it than this, but this is a big component). All to often I meet people who say they are trying to learn to day trade and they cannot even tell a basic trend on a chart - there is no way you can succeed.
If you are going to attempt to become a trader, you also must be able to make split second decisions - you cannot wait around, analyze the pros and cons, look at a daily chart, look at the news, go to Yahoo Finance, look up some fundamentals etc. - there is no time for this. If you want to be an investor there is plenty of time. You must also have a very good memory or learn to train your memory. You will need to know how certain stocks trade, the current trend etc - but you should just remember this info so if you pull up the name, you could trade it in a matter of seconds and know a reasonable stop and target based on how it normally trades.
A third skill you need is the ability to stick to a plan and to know when to alter a plan. Plan meaning target is A, stop is B. Do not just arbitrarily ignore the stop - this is what most people do because they don’t want to be wrong, don’t want to take the loss. This happens to everyone - you stop out and the stock miraculously turns and goes in the direction you bet. This causes newer stock trading to then falsely assume that stops are keeping them from making money. You also need to be able to assess when a trade is not right and exit early BEFORE it hits your stop - stuff happens in real time, sometimes that is the best plan even if it is at a loss.