Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Stock Trading - How To Pick Stocks For Stock Trading

By: Larry Schade

I have found that the best stocks for stock trading and day trading are the stocks that make up the S&P 500. The reason for this is that the large Mutual Funds and large Institutional Buyers concentrate on these stocks in their never ending quest to beat the S&P 500. These stocks generally have strong relative strength and absolute performance to the S&P 500 Index. Of these stocks, I like to concentrate on those that are in the Nasdaq 100 Composite Index. It is the Nasdaq stocks that I like to trade the most because of their volatility of the stocks in the Nasdaq 100, I concentrate on those stocks that I that I like to refer to as "trading where the action is" stocks. These are stocks that show tremendous volume in the number of shares being traded during the day, at least 15 million shares and preferably 20 million shares and more. My real preference is share volume of 30 million plus per day.

In addition, the stocks must have a large daily stock trading range, which is the difference between the high price and low price of that stock for the previous trading day, and a lot of volatility. I look for a trading range of at least $2.00 per share, but I really prefer those that are more volatile and have a daily travelling range of $3.00 to $6.00 and more.

The reason for this is that I trade both sides of the market, both the long side and the short side on an intra-day basis. I have no interest in whether the stock closed in positive, or negative territory the previous day, just as long as the volume and price action are there.

All I want is the price action, high volume and the volatility. If I have these three ingredients, I know that the major players are very active in that stock and they are either increasing, or decreasing their weighting in that stock. Adding to and contributing to the price and volume action are what I call the "accelerators", which are the momentum players, the program traders and the hedge funds who are trying to jump in ahead of the mutual funds and front run the stock, either up, or down. This is when the action really heats up and you will see "climatic volume" where each stock trade is occurring in less than a second. I have seen this many times every day. It happens all of the time.

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Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Beginner Stock Market Investing-How To Make A Fortune With Your Investments

By: Josh Neumann

So what is the best beginner stock market investing strategy for investing your money? In order to really make money from the market, you need to do several things. First of all, you need to decide which investing strategy you want to adhere to.

There are basically two schools of thought in stock market investing today. The first is technical analysis; the second is value investing. Technical analysis involves studying the stock charts of a company, identifying patterns, and making investment decisions accordingly.

For instance, you might look at a company and see that it's stock price been going up for the last two weeks. Instead of looking at how profitable the company really is, and whether or not there is any substance behind the rising stock prices, you simply buy because you want to ride it out until it peaks.

The hard part is to determine when a stock price has peaked out, and the best time to sell. Many investors do make some good money with this method. However, the potential gains are slim compared to the risk of losing.

It is very difficult to determine when a stock will go up or down, especially short term. Also, if you do manage to swing a profit, the money you spend from all the transactions very often can eat the entire profit you've made.

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Tuesday, July 24, 2007

What Is A Good Stock Investor Newsletter

By: Mark Crisp

Things to look for and Things to stay away from:

Newsletter always go forth with the same concept in mind, giving people the information that they need to make advised opinions with the knowledge they are given. News articles need to reach audiences of all ages while keeping with the topic.

In a recent study where people were surveyed about what makes a newsletter good, the majority said that it is the quality of information in the newsletter. It is imperative that the content be fresh and it is vital to keep the information in sync with the main concept of the newsletter.

What makes a stock investors newsletter good?

For starts you would want to make sure that the content is right for all levels of investors. For new investors you would want to have articles geared towards how and where you should invest as well as tips on finding the best stocks and strategies for investing.

To cover intermediate investors you will want to have detailed information on market projections and the activity of the stocks.

The experienced or advanced investors would like to see such things as a RSS feed or even a ticker that updated hourly. You could also make available articles that cover things like market temperament and trading strategies.

With all of the above combined, you should keep the goal the same which would be driving visual and element elegance. You need to make the news letter appealing both visually and intellectually to investors. With all of the above things accomplished you can be sure that the subscribers that you have, will keep coming back for more. That is the best way to make your newsletter the best it can be.

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Thursday, July 19, 2007

Stock Market Advice From Chicken Little

By: Gary Wollin

One day, while Chicken Little was walking in the woods, an acorn fell and hit him on his head.

"Goodness gracious me!" said Chicken Little, "The sky is falling, the sky is falling. I must go warn everyone."

We see this all the time. The stock market goes straight up for eight or nine months, and if there are 2 or 3 down days in a row, there is hand-wringing and the moaning all over the place.

Who are these people that panic at the first sign of a downturn or with the slightest bit of profit taking?

The first group are people who get in the near the top and are now worried that their small losses will turn into big losses. Also, people who haven't invested in the stock market are in this same box. For many, many years they were wrong to not have invested, but now that the market has declined very slightly for a few days they would like the point out how smart they are and how dumb everyone else is.

Short sellers are the next group. Short selling is selling a security that the seller does not own but is committed to repurchasing eventually. It is used to take advantage of an expected decline in the security's price.

The press comes next. You have heard this before: "bad news sells newspapers."

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Wednesday, July 11, 2007

The Master Trader

By: Reynaldo Soriano Jr.

I have always compared trading to martial arts because they are psychologically the same. Like martial arts, there are different levels of trading.

At the entry level, a trader is similar to a martial arts white belt, and has just started searching for the right trading system. The belief of beginners is that after they go to a seminar or read a trading book for the first time, they will soon make lots of money. They are convinced that trading will make them millionaires in a short period of time. Most of them would also like to leave their jobs as soon as possible.

The second level of traders is the blue belt level. This type of trader is learning that trading can be easy or tough. When challenged, they will either persist and keep going to more seminars, looking for the "holy grail," or they will give up and play the victim, saying that trading is "risky." I call this the break-out stage. They either remain or leave.

The third level of traders is the black belt level. These traders start to realize that psychology plays a big role in trading. They also start to learn more about themselves. They begin to perfect their trading skills systematically and psychologically.

The fourth level of traders is the master level--the highest level of trading. When they trade, they are at one with the market physically, psychologically, and spiritually. They feel the market and they have no fear. They control their emotions when challenged and they take full responsibility of their own actions. In ancient Japanese, this is called Mushin.

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Tuesday, July 3, 2007

How You Can Make Ten Times Your Salary- With Day Trading

By: Joseph Plazo

Day trading - no, it's not something that Bill Murray wished he had in Groundhog Day. It's a style of trading on the foreign currency exchange market in which a trader completes all his trades within a single day. In other words, he may make a few dozen - or more - trades in a day with the objective of buying and selling quickly and making a profit from the fluctuations in a currency exchange rate over the course of the day.

Sound complicated? Depending on the method or system that you use to pick your trades it can be. The idea behind day trading is that currency exchange rates are subject to fluctuations over the course of the day - they go up and down depending on who's buying, who's selling and what rumors are floating around. In fact, day trading in the foreign currency market is probably the single segment of any type of stocks, currency or futures trading market most affected by rumors and real-time, real-world happenings. A savvy trader who is quick on his feet can roll up the profits by paying attention to what the current news is doing to the currency exchange rates.

The currency market, commonly referred to as the forex (short for Foreign Exchange), is the most liquid market in the world. The latest statistics say that daily trading on forex is in excess of $1.3 trillion U.S. dollars. That makes forex the world's largest, most efficient market. A major part of the reason for the liquidity and volume of trade is the practice of day trading. The difference between day trading and other types of trading is in how long you hold your stocks (or in this case, your currency). In day trading, you hold nothing beyond the close of the day's market. Think of it as a game in which the object is to keep trading cards back and forth, increasing the value of your cards - but have no cards in your hand at the end of the day.

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Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Beware Of High Cost Seminars

By: Ian Jackson

Over the last four years, I must have attended five or six seminars, paying upwards of 800 US dollars each time. The seminars covered such topics as Fibonacci, Writing Covered Calls, Moving Averages and other well known applications of statistical methods to trading; what are commonly known as technical trading or charting techniques.

Once home, I would excitedly go over the material in the free attendee info pack. Invariably, I would find most of the information contained within the format of these seminars to be mere recycled material. The same, if not better, information is in fact available online, occasionally for free, but if not, at a much reduced cost.

You might point to the notion that if anything of value is desired, one has to pay for it. Granted, that for anything worthwhile and of substance, there will be a price tag attached; this should be even more valid for trading systems and information, after all one is expected to make some money using the information.

But, and make that a BIG BUT! There is so much more useful and appropriate information available online, for so much less than the costs of seminars: these run into the hundreds of pounds or dollars! These seminars charge you a small fortune, but the value that they return to you is a big letdown.

At all the seminars I attended, I even had to sign confidentiality agreements. Why? These people say they have something new and secret; yet they run hundreds of seminars exactly like the one they are giving, and they tell all the attendees of their seminars to keep quiet about what they are saying. Do they really expect that to happen?

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