How to Trade Stocks

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Trading in the stock market can be very profitable or painfully unprofitable. Many professional traders can make a few hundred to a few hudred thousand dollars a year - depending on the traders competence, the system used to trade, also referred to as the traders game, and whether you trade on your own, you trade with losers, or you trade with winners. So can you; you just have to know what to do. Other traders, relying on old-school trading systems can suffer huge losses, quickly and for some tragically as they wipe out their trading account.
This article will show you how to win and how to lose.
By the way, this article has a bias toward Day Trading Stocks, as opposed to Swing Trading or trading Investor styles.
You've probably noticed the 10, 20, 30% price swings overnight or within just a few days lately, during the financial crises (caused by "toxic" paper, primarily real estate oriented).
The only way to be sure to avoid these kind of tramatic losses is to be flat at market close.
So you will find this article Day Trading focused.

  Steps

1.   Learn to read charts - learn how to use technical analysis effectively and profitably. This is simply using past index and price action to anticipate future results. For instance if a stock has been going up for the last 6 months it is important to assume it will keep going up unless the chart action tells you otherwise. Technical traders trade what they see not what they feel will happen next. Arrogance kills.
   
2.   Understand Tension, or the concepts of support and resistance. Support and resistance are considered critical indicators for price continuation, stalls, or reversals. These are visual charted tops and bottoms of a stock. For example, say that a stock trades between $55 and $65. Next time the stock is trading at $55 (support), you would expect it to go back up to $65 (resistance), and vice versa.
   
   
   • If this stock goes up to around $68, far beyond resistance of $65, you would no longer expect it to go to its old support at $55. Instead you would expect $65 to be its new support and for the stock to go to new highs. The opposite would be true if the stock broke below $55.
     
   
   
3.   Be consistent with your rules for trading. This is essential for profitability. You must have systemic rules, rules for your trading game, that you must follow. These rules tell you when to get in and when to get out. Follow these rules strictly even if it means taking a loss now and then.
   
4. Here's the key to success as a stock day trader - for you to have the possibility to develop a lucrative career and a very profitable business - day trading stocks. Stop trading on your own.
   
5. Like world-class professional athletes, at the top of their game, they learn to win with the help of a world-class consultant / coach
   
6. Start day trading a game that's at least winnable.
   
7. Over 95% of traders follow the losers, as they read obsolete books, buy old-school systems and indicators of the day without knowing that all this obsolete stuff is used by big money to kill the little guy.
   
8. There's a new trading game in town and it's your job, if you want to survive and then be profitable, to find it, practice it, learn it, and develop your competence with it.
   
9. Eventually you too can become a winner, a consistently profitable winner, not on your own this time but with outside support and guidance, actively trading with winners and your own personal and professional coach.
   
10. Focus on learning, not the money.
    
11. Build your confidence, develop your competence, and settle for nothing less than trading at your optimal level of performance excellence.
    

  Tips

• There are 4 Types of Losers:
  
• · Winners - hopeful, but not yet profitable
  
• · Bored - break even trading results, at best
  
• · Losers - blowing out trading accounts
  
• · Repeat Losers - crash (emotionally) and burn (financially) - over and over again
  
• Then, of course, there are want-to-be traders, with or without adequate risk capital, who put up with whatever they earn on their current job, career, or business – unable to make the leap to trading stocks, for whatever reasons. Their loss – major opportunity income as stock traders.
  

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