I’m realizing more and more how much I don’t know about trading. To study up, I plan on buying Brian Shannon’s book, but before doing so right now I’m reading something more basic and dumbed down – Technical Analysis for Dummies. All of this introductory info about the stock market is on the web for free in various places (I liked the courses at Informed Trades) but its nice to squirrel away and not read from the screen.

My dream is to take my $10,000 in real money to implement swing and day trading strategies successfully. Like I mentioned, I will be splitting this money across four accounts to give me 12 day trades a week (3 per account) as well as overnight swing trades. Maybe someday I can grow the pot to have enough money (25K+) to open a professional day trade account.

In the meantime, I’m practicing day trades in a Virtual Stock Exchange account at Market Watch. I realize that this is not the same environment as actually trading, but I think its a reasonable facsimile as discussed in an earlier blog post. Right now I have the luxury in the mornings to learn the ins and outs of how stocks move real-time on the market. All my practice day trades this last Friday were based on alerts and buzz in the chat room on Investors Live (formerly Green on the Screen). In the future, I will be limiting my trades to 10% of my account to be more realistic to the risk I would take in real life.

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There’s no reason to go over each of these trades. I basically saw alerts on the chat and looked at their charts. There were other options, but these seemed like the best in the quick amount of time I had to make a decision. That’s where I need to build alot of skills, to be able to analyze the chart quickly and with deeper understanding, and then eventually be better at identifying good prospects without such dependence on the chatroom. The profit on LFG is inflated because the amount of stock involved in that trade is 5X my 10% limit. Should of had a tigher stop limit on DPTR (this was nearly a 8% loss). I bailed on AN way too soon (I got nervous even with paper money!). It eventually, sank to $5.50 at the end of the day. So I need to let the trades happen and not be panicky and impulsive. I’ve never shorted a stock so this was a good practice to start understanding that strategy.