Advanced Day Trading Strategies

By Peter Skonctue

Being able to match a trader's individual personality and strengths with a specific technique, is perhaps the best way to begin day trading, in that it can vastly increase a trader's chances of success.

Day trading is the practice of buying and selling financial instruments, such as securities, within the same trading day. Traders who practice day trading are called active traders or day traders. This field used to reserve for financial firms, fund mangers, investment firms, and banks. With the advent of electronic and online day trading, however, it has become accessible to almost anybody interested in the practice.

Strategies Used In Day Trading

There are a wide variety of strategies and techniques used by day traders to help them make good profit. The basic day trading strategies are as follows:

News playing, Trend following, Rebate trading, and Contrarian investing

Contrarian investing is basically a form of day trading which follows the ideology that those securities which have been rising steadily, will eventually begin to fall. If securities have been falling, then the exact opposite view is applied.

News playing is a technique which relies on buying and selling securities based entirely on news which has been released by the specific company.

Rebate Trading is a trading strategy that uses ECN rebates as its primary source of income. This strategy usually involves purchasing low priced securities in large volumes.

Scalping is a technique which involves buying securities and then selling them within minutes, or even seconds. As a result, traders who use this strategy aim to profit from the small price gaps which occur almost immediately after a purchase.

Trend following is basically the exact opposite of contrarian investing, in that traders who use this strategy will usually assume that rising securities will continue to rise, while falling securities will continue to fall.

Other popular trading strategies include the likes of Short Sells and Range Trading.

Finding the Perfect Strategy

Alarmingly enough, it is said that approximately 80% of day traders end up losing all their available capital before they manage to learn about the various trading strategies, and this is why it's imperative to start out slowly, and to limit yourself to taking small risks. Below are a few tips which can help you in determining what the right day trading strategy for you is.

Match the right strategy with the right trader - It is important to match the trader's personality, strengths, comfort level, and investing freedom with the right strategy. Those who are less inclined to take risks may benefit from scalping, news playing and rebate trading. Risk takers on the other hand may have no problem using trend following and contrarian investing.

Starting mall and treading lightly - newcomers in particular should start out slowly by making small investments, as this will afford them an opportunity to learn about the different advantages and disadvantages regarding the different strategies.

Day traders can of course also benefit financially from using multiple strategies at the same time. For example, you could consider investing the majority of your capital using one of the low risk strategies, while at the same time investing some capital using one of the high yielding strategies. - 31970

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