JohnHumbert
02-24-2006, 03:30 AM
SpiderWeb asked these questions:
Can you explain more of you strategies? What is your daily routine? What software is good for research? It sounds like you write some of your own? Are there certain data bases you use? Or are you able to pull everything from the exchanges? Are there any good stock services? Please explain trailing stops, stop limits and margins these are not well explained by my online broker. What is a good starting strategy or plan for low dollar traders? My goal may be foolish but I try to just make a small amount per trade or break even and if I do better then that’s great.
Here are my responses:
(1) Strategies I will have to discuss in a separate post(s). Even the very simple REIT strategy took several long posts just to outline the basics. Some of the strategies I use are very complex - and some are high-risk, high-reward - and some I want to keep secret.
(2) I am lucky enough to be able to be online all day, as I work in the IT industry as an architect designing/developing complex database systems, data warehouses, and data analysis services. Hence my affinity for numbers, patterns, etc - which is what got me interested in stock trading in the first place. I keep my stock software up all day, watching prices, etc. as I work on my regular job projects - and have my trading software set up to send me an email alert on certain events. I check my various watch list a several times each day and when I have a trade going on - pop over to that window in between code compiles, writing code, and other stuff associated with my job. My boss is very accommodating of what I do and my work never suffers. I do all my research at night - like now (it's 2am) - so my daytime effort is minimal - I know exact what I'm going to do the night before - just make the clicks when the time comes during trading hours.
(3) Research is done with just about anything I can get my hands on. There are literally thousands of sources of information on the internet - google them up. However, specifically I usually use finance.yahoo.com for non-real time quotes, company profiles, and message boards, sometimes nasdaq.com - and stockcharts.com for chart analysis. I do write my own software for tracking and trade predictions.
(4) I discussed margin already in another post on the TTMB forum. The trading terms and order types I will discuss in an upcoming post.
(5) Low-dollar Traders? NOT! I would consider $5000 the absolute minimum for trading and even then it's hardly worth it. A more reasonable level would be $15,000 to $25,000 to start. If you have less than that, better to put the money into a mutual fund or perhaps a single stock and just wait.
Here's why - let's do the numbers......
Even with a discount broker, you're going to pay around $10 for a buy and $10 for a sell in commissions. So you have $20 for a "round-trip". If you bought just a hundred share of a stock, you would need at least a 20 cent increase in stock price just to break even. If you had only $1000 to invest, and you got 100 shares - that means you would be looking for a $10 stock to buy. A 20 cent increase on a $10 stock is a 2% gain - which is a whole lot for a stock to move - and that's just to break even. In this example, to make $20 profit, you would need a 4% in the stock price. That's a HUGE percentage gain, just to make $20 gross (and then end up paying a couple of dollars in tax!).
If you wanted 200 shares for your $1000, you would have to buy a $5 stock, and need an 8% gain - again just to make $20. Better to buy a scratch-off lottery ticket - more chance in getting $20 than identifying a stock that will make an 8% gain short-term!
For me, buying a 1000 shares of a stock is a minimum. At 1000 shares, I only need at 2 cent gain to cover my round-trip brokerage fees. With 1000 shares, a $0.30 gain is $280 ($300-$20 fee) and what I consider the minimum profit to make it worth a trade.
A 1% gain is again a minimum for me - and if a 1% gain for a stock is $0.30, then I need to be looking at a $30 stock - and for a 1000 shares I would need $30,000, cash or margin.
Remember, 1% to 3% per trade doesn't sound like much - but it's realistic average for trading stocks. If you made 1 trade a week, every week, and made 1% each trade - you'd make over 50% a year. It takes a lot of work and effort to be successful at 1% per week. If you only had a $1000, that's a lot of effort for $500 year - and that's before taxes and figuring an excellent trading record to get 50% - even with the REIT strategy I outlined, it would only get about 20%-30% per year -tops!
Not worth the effort, is it? It's better to do some side work, hold a garage sale, or sell some stuff on Ebay for $300-$500.
However, if you have $30,000 and you can make 30% - that's $10,000 and now becomes worth the time and effort.
I consider myself to be a succesful trader. In the past 6 months, I made 41 trades, and only averaged a smidgen over 1% per trade. My biggest single-trade gains were 4%, 4.5%, and 6%. My biggest loss was 2%. Most of my trades were about 1.5% to 2% - I plan on 2% per trade, which is aggressive.
Folks should understand that TRADING stocks is about making SMALL gains, over and over and over - the final result may be a big increase - but you do it a little at a time. If you are thinking about making 10%, 20%, or 30% in just a couple of trades - then you are a speculator, a gambler - and will more than likely lose big.
Now you can make 30% in a single trade/single stock - but it will be a long term investment, usually a minimum of a year or two. I don't consider that trading - that's INVESTING, which is a whole different ballgame. I'll make a post about INVESTING long term after I get back from fishing this weekend.
Can you explain more of you strategies? What is your daily routine? What software is good for research? It sounds like you write some of your own? Are there certain data bases you use? Or are you able to pull everything from the exchanges? Are there any good stock services? Please explain trailing stops, stop limits and margins these are not well explained by my online broker. What is a good starting strategy or plan for low dollar traders? My goal may be foolish but I try to just make a small amount per trade or break even and if I do better then that’s great.
Here are my responses:
(1) Strategies I will have to discuss in a separate post(s). Even the very simple REIT strategy took several long posts just to outline the basics. Some of the strategies I use are very complex - and some are high-risk, high-reward - and some I want to keep secret.
(2) I am lucky enough to be able to be online all day, as I work in the IT industry as an architect designing/developing complex database systems, data warehouses, and data analysis services. Hence my affinity for numbers, patterns, etc - which is what got me interested in stock trading in the first place. I keep my stock software up all day, watching prices, etc. as I work on my regular job projects - and have my trading software set up to send me an email alert on certain events. I check my various watch list a several times each day and when I have a trade going on - pop over to that window in between code compiles, writing code, and other stuff associated with my job. My boss is very accommodating of what I do and my work never suffers. I do all my research at night - like now (it's 2am) - so my daytime effort is minimal - I know exact what I'm going to do the night before - just make the clicks when the time comes during trading hours.
(3) Research is done with just about anything I can get my hands on. There are literally thousands of sources of information on the internet - google them up. However, specifically I usually use finance.yahoo.com for non-real time quotes, company profiles, and message boards, sometimes nasdaq.com - and stockcharts.com for chart analysis. I do write my own software for tracking and trade predictions.
(4) I discussed margin already in another post on the TTMB forum. The trading terms and order types I will discuss in an upcoming post.
(5) Low-dollar Traders? NOT! I would consider $5000 the absolute minimum for trading and even then it's hardly worth it. A more reasonable level would be $15,000 to $25,000 to start. If you have less than that, better to put the money into a mutual fund or perhaps a single stock and just wait.
Here's why - let's do the numbers......
Even with a discount broker, you're going to pay around $10 for a buy and $10 for a sell in commissions. So you have $20 for a "round-trip". If you bought just a hundred share of a stock, you would need at least a 20 cent increase in stock price just to break even. If you had only $1000 to invest, and you got 100 shares - that means you would be looking for a $10 stock to buy. A 20 cent increase on a $10 stock is a 2% gain - which is a whole lot for a stock to move - and that's just to break even. In this example, to make $20 profit, you would need a 4% in the stock price. That's a HUGE percentage gain, just to make $20 gross (and then end up paying a couple of dollars in tax!).
If you wanted 200 shares for your $1000, you would have to buy a $5 stock, and need an 8% gain - again just to make $20. Better to buy a scratch-off lottery ticket - more chance in getting $20 than identifying a stock that will make an 8% gain short-term!
For me, buying a 1000 shares of a stock is a minimum. At 1000 shares, I only need at 2 cent gain to cover my round-trip brokerage fees. With 1000 shares, a $0.30 gain is $280 ($300-$20 fee) and what I consider the minimum profit to make it worth a trade.
A 1% gain is again a minimum for me - and if a 1% gain for a stock is $0.30, then I need to be looking at a $30 stock - and for a 1000 shares I would need $30,000, cash or margin.
Remember, 1% to 3% per trade doesn't sound like much - but it's realistic average for trading stocks. If you made 1 trade a week, every week, and made 1% each trade - you'd make over 50% a year. It takes a lot of work and effort to be successful at 1% per week. If you only had a $1000, that's a lot of effort for $500 year - and that's before taxes and figuring an excellent trading record to get 50% - even with the REIT strategy I outlined, it would only get about 20%-30% per year -tops!
Not worth the effort, is it? It's better to do some side work, hold a garage sale, or sell some stuff on Ebay for $300-$500.
However, if you have $30,000 and you can make 30% - that's $10,000 and now becomes worth the time and effort.
I consider myself to be a succesful trader. In the past 6 months, I made 41 trades, and only averaged a smidgen over 1% per trade. My biggest single-trade gains were 4%, 4.5%, and 6%. My biggest loss was 2%. Most of my trades were about 1.5% to 2% - I plan on 2% per trade, which is aggressive.
Folks should understand that TRADING stocks is about making SMALL gains, over and over and over - the final result may be a big increase - but you do it a little at a time. If you are thinking about making 10%, 20%, or 30% in just a couple of trades - then you are a speculator, a gambler - and will more than likely lose big.
Now you can make 30% in a single trade/single stock - but it will be a long term investment, usually a minimum of a year or two. I don't consider that trading - that's INVESTING, which is a whole different ballgame. I'll make a post about INVESTING long term after I get back from fishing this weekend.