Best Momentum Trading Course

Anybody who wants to learn day trading wishes to follow certain guidelines. I won’t say rules because a lot of people don’t like the word, but principles. A number of them are quite well known and a few of them are less so, but they are all vital to the successful day trader. The Forex Rebellion defines them as the four major guidelines trading.

1. The Buck Stops With You

Whether you are looking round for a day trading programme or developing your own, remember that whatever you do is your responsibility. Ask for recommendation and help by all means, but don’t believe everything you hear. People are different and their trading styles can alter very, so never follow advice blindly.

Equally, you can buy in a system but do not neglect to test it. Whether or not the guy who designed it asserts that it’ll double your money in 2 months for certain sure, you must test, because there are three possible Problems with that. One, he might be lying. Two, perhaps it used to work great but it doesn’t work any more. Three, perhaps it works for him but for some unusual reason to do with your spread or whatever, it doesn’t work for you. Your cash is your responsibility and yours alone, so put the system to work on a demo account until you are sure.

2. Be Calm

The most important enemy of any trader is their own feelings and this is especially true for the individual that wants to learn day trading. If you are the sort of person who makes bad choices under stress, you might want to think again about choosing day trading as your system. This is a fast moving world where seconds can count in thousands of bucks, so you must keep a particularly cool head.

Now just about everyone likes to think they seem to be a calm sort of person who would react way below pressure, so even if you are convinced you are going to be the planet’s number one ice cold trader, test yourself as well as your system in that demo account. If you curve off the system even once or start changing your position size, closing out early, waiting too long etc in demo mode, sorry but you aren’t prepared for real life trading when things will be much more hairy. Keep working on it.

3. Track Everything

Even though you have got to work fast when you’re using day trading systems , it is worth making the effort to scribble everything down. This is a skill you can train yourself of while in demo. You’ll be dazzled how much it helps you to understand why things went wrong or right when they did. This can enable to to tweak a marginal system into a profitable one and make all the difference to your bottom line. A simple spreadsheet recording your position, the signal(s) and the opening and closing costs is sufficient during trading. Afterward you may need to add a comment.  

4. If You Doubt, Stay Away

This is a widely known trading and investment rule. Don’t take a chance on something that nearly fits your system but not really. It may work once but over the long term this may lead to disaster. There is probably a reason why the system is set up for the signals that it has and if the market does not fit, do not force it.

Equally if you’re sick or under stress about another area of your life, it can be better to keep away from the market, particularly while you’re still a relative beginner. There will be other and better opportunities to learn day trading when you are feeling in top condition.

One of the most popular technical analysis indicators is the simple moving average also known as SMA, if you learn how to use these correctly they can be a very useful tool to help you to make good trading decisions.

The 50 simple moving average, or 50 SMA, is simply the sum of the last 50 values for each period, divided by 50, this is a moving window, as time moves on so does the average. Notice that I used the term period because this indicator works on any time period in exactly the same way.

It can be used on monthly, weekly, daily, hourly, 30 minutes, 15 minute and on whatever time period you want to monitor and trade. Although the SMA is the most commonly used there is also the exponential moving average or EMA. This is a weighted version of the formula using the mathematical exponent function to give more weight to the more recent values, this has the effect of making it a slightly faster average that many traders prefer.

The truth is that it probably does not matter if you used the SMA or the EMA, what does matter however is that you use one or the other and then be very consistent with it. Do not switch between them, it is more important that you learn to trust your chosen indicator then a slight difference in its value.

The simple moving average is primarily used to determine what the current trend of the stock is, depending on the value used it could be a short term, medium term or long term trend. An important point to note is that moving averages are really only useful when the stock is trending, if the moving average is flat, i.e. horizontal on your chart it can become very choppy, this is a good time to not trade.

The general rule is that if the current price is above the SMA the trend is up, if below the trend is down. This is very important to understand because it forms the basics of trend trading and trading with the trend.

For the short term trend many traders like using a 5-8 SMA or EMA, here is a trading secret, never trade again the direction of the short term tend, actually this is really just common sense when you think about it.

Moving averages often act as support or resistance, many traders use the 15, 21 or 30 SMA for this purpose.

There are a number of other very important moving averages that you need to know about, these are the 50, 100 and 200 SMA, and this mainly applies to the daily and weekly charts. A lot of big players in the markets, the mutual funds, investment banks etc use the 50 and 200 SMA as support and resistance, if they decide to buy or sell based on these you need to follow suite, the 100 to a lesser extent. These are very useful averages to watch if you trade EFT’s like an Oil ETF.

A useful tip is that when a stock breaks through one moving average it will often move all the way to the next, for example, if a stock breaks the 30 SMA it may move to the 50 before finding some support or resistance.

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Although it may seem obvious to most stock market swing traders there are a number of simple rules that you can follow which will ensure that you have more success when buying stocks:

In the USA stock market there are 3 major indexes which are each made up of a basket of stocks, they are the S and P 500 (also known as the S&P500), the DOW 30 and the Nadaq 100. These stock indexes generally only contain major blue chip stocks, as long as you buy from these 3 groups you will at least know that you are getting a well known solid stock.

For example the DOW 30 contains major industrials and large multinational stocks such as Home Depot (HD) and Johnson and Johnson (JNJ) whereas the Nasdaq 100 mainly contains techical companies such as Apple (AAPL) and Miscrosoft (MSFT).

Always buy a stock that is liquid, this means that it is a highly traded stock, this will enable you to quickly buy and sell at the price you want without having a delay. You will also get a lower spread, thats the difference between the BID and ASK price of the stock. For a stock to be considered highly liquid it should trade at least 500,000 shares per day, ideally even more.

It is best to aviod stocks that are bellow as this usually means the company is in trouble, although with the bear market of 2008/9 there have been a lot of good stocks at bargin prices between and . Avoid buying a stock below at anytime.

Another consideration is options, does the stock has options?, this will be important if you want to trade options around your stock, such as a covered call, or you may want to buy a PUT option in order to protect your stock.

Be very cautious about buying a stock just before it’s earnings release, stocks often drop significantly if you come out with a poor report. Earnings releases are 4 times a year with one of them being the annual report.

If you are going to trade options make sure that you learn how to trade by getting some good education. There are many swing trading strategies that work well with stocks in todays volatile markets.

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There is a lot of hype surrounding options trading, and for good reason, it’s a good way make a lot of cash fast, or can be used to grow your capital consistently month after month.

There’s also a lot of hype about how complicated it is and why you need to spend thousands of dollars on options trading education before you get started. Needless to say this last statement usually comes from trading seminar companies trying to sell your their trading course on options.

Lets cover a few of the basics about options and set you straight about a few important points. Firstly yes it is true that you can make a lot of cash trading options, but of course you can also lose just as fast.

When trading stocks your leverage is 1:1, if you go on margin you can get get 1:2 leverage, but thats about it. With options it is not as straight forward to calculate the leverage but generally speaking you can get between 1:5 and 1:10 when you buy an option on a stock, or ETF.

So with 1:10 leverage, when the stock increases by 5% your option can increase by approx 50%, and this can happen in just a few days, this is why swing trading strategies using options on stocks is so popular.

However the downside is that a big loss can also happen, if the stock drops by 5% your option can also drop by 50%, at which point you may want to close the trade and save some of your option value, it really depends on what your stop loss and risk.

What I’ve just described is called directional option trading where you are betting on the getting the direction of the stock movement correct, this is highly speculative. Options can also be used in option strategies which are much more non-directional, such as covered call trades, credit spreads and Iron Condors. In these trades there is much less dependance on getting the stock direction correct, but it still matters.

So should you learn to trade options?, in my opinion you should not do directional option trades until you become an expert stock trader 1st. This is because you really need to be very precise with your entry and exit strategy and trading plan, and be very good at technical analysis.

Whereas if you want to do non-directional option trades you don’t need to be such an experianced stock trader to be successful, but of course it does not hurt either.

Learning how to trade options is a very useful skill you have, but don’t rush into it and blow out your account. Make sure that you get a good options trading education before you start, and also make sure that you have a very solid stock trading education as well, such one from Top Dog Trading Review.

Trading options is both similar to and different from trading stocks. There are many ways to make money trading stocks from going long to day trading.In this regard,options and stock trading, are similar.

The starting point for learning options trading is knowing the difference between an option and a stock. An option is merely the right to purchase a particular stock at a specific price over a specific period of time.The price of the stock itself can fluctuate, as we all know,over the expiration interval so there’s the usual volatility factor in market prices.

Options, on the other hand, expire on a specific date, so you’ll need to exercise them on or before that date. And you don’t even have to exercise your option if you so choose. Plus, you can purchase an option for a fraction of the actual price of the stock.Options traders can leverage their investment by being able to trade more stocks.They can acquire the option to buy a $100 stock for only a fraction of that price.Hence, they can acquire options for more stocks than if they were actually purchasing the stocks outright.This ability to leverage your investment makes options very attrative.

There are different types of options,too. “American” options can be exercised any time before their expiration date, while ”European” options can only be exercised on the expiration date itself.And just to complicate matters, where you purchase the option has nothing to do with it’s being American or European.The European options tend to apply to indexes whereas American options apply mostly to stocks and bonds. And most options expire the Saturday after the third Friday each month. But U.S. markets are closed on weekends, so “American” options expire on the third Friday of the month and ”European” options the following day.

An option is a contract that gives you the right to sell (a put option)a stock or buy (a call option) a stock on or before its expiration date.There are several strategic choices when you purchase an option. You can exercise it any time either before or on the expiration date.Or you decide not to exercise it and try to sell the option before the expiration date and recoup a portion of your investment. If the option expires and you don’t exercise it, you lose your investment.Let’s look at these situations more closely:

Let’s say you buy an option for Acme Chemicals Corp.You can buy a $20 stock for only a $2 options cost. Now most options contracts require a minimum purchase of 100 shares, so you’d have to pay $200 (for 100 shares) for the contract.Acme’s stock price rises to $25 two weeks later and rather than waiting for the expiration date, you decide to take your profit and run. You exercise the option, acquire the stock for $20 and turn around and sell the stock right away for $25.After you deduct the $2 acquisition cost per share, you’re left with a $3 profit, or $300 less brokerage commissions.Pretty conservative, but you made money.And that’s good!

But consider the opposite scenario. What happens if the Acme’s share price doesn’t rise. What happens if the price of the stock falls below $20? If you sold your options for half of what they cost you, in this example,you’d only be out $100. Just remember that just because you own an option, you do not have to exercise it. So you can sell the option and recoup a portion of your investment. This is better than acquiring 100 shares of Acme’s stock outright. You can jump in and exercise the option when you know you will make a profit, or you could wait it out until the expiration date and make your decision then. I personally think the more conservative approach is more likely to result in consistently positive returns, albeit perhaps lower than a more aggressive strategy. But that’s just me. Higher risk, higher returns. Higher profits. And potentially greater losses.And like other investments.

This is just a simplified explanation of what trading options entails. It is more complicated than this and you should really educate yourself before you commit much of your capital to it. The best options trading trading tutorial I know is the one taught by David Vallieres, which you can review here and the video above from the free demo video series he provides. I think this course is the best because you’ll not only learn how to trade options, but you’ll also learn how to make money.