We all have our own daily pressures with work but to some people trading the stock market always sounds very glamorous. This is why today's update has a brief overview of the day in the life of a day trader. We hope that this is educational and insightful to people who want to learn how to become traders and by showing you a slice of what we do on a daily basis so you can see the method behind the structure.
We have multiple trading strategies that we work on, some of which are short term Day Trading Strategies, swing trading positions and of course our core long term trading investments. Philip and I as professional chart technicians have to focus daily on a number of different market instruments and have to always be fully prepared.
Being prepared can mean a whole number of things, but to Philip and I turning up prepared is about having a clear head. Outside distractions should be dealt with before switching the computer on or even better left at the office door. More information on this can be found under the Trading Psychology section of the website.
Here is a small insight into our daily routine as day traders
(Remember we are on different Time Zones! GMT:+1)
8:00 Wake Up
45 minute run to clear the mind
9:00 Shower freshen up
10:00Â Breakfast and coffee
10:30 Logon the computer to check out all the important news feeds and emails
11:00 Respond to any emails and write the daily update
11:45 Skype call to Philip: run our daily scan and do our analysis on the markets.
1:00 Lunch
2:00 Skype call to Philip: secondary analysis review of the basket of stocks entry and exit strategies
3:00 Pre market analysis to make sure our analysis is correct
3:30 Market opens so wait for triggers
Constant market analysis and news feeds
5:30 - 8:00 Monitoring trades for further analysis
Bed time and ready to do it all over again!
You can see from the structure of our day we spend a great deal of time studying our analysis which is a key factor in becoming a successful day trader! The majority of our analysis is done via screen sharing conference calls so at any given point Philip can see my thoughts and vice versa. This is why for us, multi monitor trading systems are paramount as we have a large amount of data being delivered to our work stations which both of us need to be able to see at a click of a mouse.
Market conditions
All markets are showing bullish signals. We have higher highs and higher lows in both the SP-500 (ES) and the YM and the Nasdaq has now broken the upper trendline but because of where the price action is we are erring on the side of caution but definitely favouring going long. Having said that, we are only using the indices as market analysis as we see more opportunity in the stocks themselves at this moment therefore offering a better risk to reward ratio.
From our market analysis we can see that the MA's (moving averages) are not trending like we have been used to for the past couple of months and this is down to the sideways price action. This is one observation to have in the back of your mind when opening a new position in the market.
If you have any questions relating to this Market Update or wish for us to talk about a trading subject that you're interested in, please don't hesitate to contact us.