Let’s face it: The days of toiling away in a blue collar job or a white collar cubicle, making decent money and good benefits, are slowly coming to an end. Automation is coming around the corner, robots are going to take way more jobs than you think and the importance of human ingenuity is going to skyrocket. So learning how to day trade with interactive brokers now, earning your way to financial independence, is important before the job market completely changes.
Day trading is not for the faint of heart. It takes time to learn how to properly implement the strategies needed in order to find stocks that are going to make moves during the day. You need discipline and dedication to make it as a day trading student. There are strategies like momentum trading or gap and go trading, that mean searching the market each morning for stocks are showing signs of big jumps and getting on those stocks very quickly.
Day trading strategies can be taught. But the students must be willing to put in the screen time to trade every day and see the patterns in real time. When you work with interactive brokers, you need to be able to watch advanced charts and read spreadsheets and ingest breaking news and understand the risk profile of a trade very quickly. You need to jump on those trades early and often. That means being able to take in and synthesize information quickly and efficiently.
Risk management is very big part of the process. When you are day trading, you are usually trading on margin. That means, basically, you are trading on credit. You need to make sure that you have a plan for each and every trade you enter and how to get out when it starts to go south. There is no valor in sticking with a bad trade as it dips, hoping that it is going to move back to the black. You need to limit your losses quickly and be able to keep a profit/loss ratio of 2:1.
Using interactive brokers like Ameritrade’s Thinkorswim allow you to see a lot of research right up on your screen and even test out trade in a risk analysis feature that allows you to game out what a trade might look like. That is a great option for beginning traders. When you first start out, getting to test out trades without losing actual money is great way to get screen time.
When you are struggling out there on the job market, bouncing from restaurant server to call center punching bag, it is nice to know that the path to financial independence is out there. It is possible to look at this day trading game and think that it is too risky or dominated by fancy trading algorithms. Which is possible, but it is also possible to learn how to pick your spots and find stocks to trade with the potential for profits.
You are not going to get rich overnight. But if you do want to make a move towards financial freedom and you have the patience to hits singles and doubles in the market, while keeping an eye out for real home runs, that means you have a path. A path to ultimate profitability.
