Stock Trading 101

Posted by Nick Niesen on November 8th, 2010

Looking for Basic Resources

I do not consider myself to be an incompetent individual. However when it comes to the stock market and trading stocks I have always known that I am in way over my head swimming in a sea that I just don?t belong. I have dabbled in stock trading from time to time, but I certainly never really got it right.

After a great deal of frustration I finally sat down at my trusty computer and hit the internet looking for information to bring me to the basics of stock trading. What I found rocked my world and completely opened my eyes. I landed on onlinetradingideas website and had instant access to all the stock trading information I could ever handle. The best part about the website was that it was written by unbiased authors and the informative stock articles were hand selected by the webmaster. Thus, I was not amidst a frenzy of advertising that meant nothing to me. I could focus immediately on learning the secrets to day trading.

Anyone who wants to understand the mysterious secrets behind day trading seriously need to go and check out the site. You don?t have to pay to read, you simply click the article you want and get busy learning everything you can.

Simple Strategy for Day Trading

One of the first thing I ran across was a very informative article on coming up with your basic strategy for day trading. They took me way beyond the basic knowledge of buy low and sell high. I had no day trading strategy. I just figured you picked a stock you were familiar with and hoped it did well and sold it when you thought it really couldn?t do much better. Turns out my lame strategy for day trading would have ended up costing me a lot of money.

After I set up my basic strategy and felt I had a firmer grasp on how the stock market really worked, I continued on with my education. I went on to learn about momentum trading. I figured just from the word I could figure out what that meant. Turns out I was about half right, and that momentum trading is a hot and fast way to find yourself in profit. It?s definitely effective and there is quite a bit to learn about momentum trading. Luckily, the articles and resources were informative enough to really get me going with enough understanding and confidence put a little money where my mouth is. Day trading here I come.

Understanding what stocks to look for and how to take advantage of them in momentum trading takes a little trial and error, but very little. It is laid out for you step by step and you can find answers to your questions before they even cross your brain. After reading the materials provided on picking stocks and putting them to practical use, I could see where I had been making huge errors in the past. It was liberating to make a few solid choices and run with them. I felt like a stock market whiz.

Basic Understanding: When to Trade

Now I?m feeling like a pro. I understand my very basics of stock strategy and even how to pick better stocks. The wind is my back and I have visions of quitting my day job and sitting in front of the computer all day long and just trading stocks. My significant other kindly pointed out that a person has to do something for more than a week to be a professional, and I reasoned myself back down to realistic expectations and hit the website for more juicy nuggets of knowledge.

I am now perusing the topics and I remembered seeing a section on when to trade earlier in the week so I hop on that and start absorbing. Again the basic principle of buy low and sell high still applies but there was so much more to it than that. I learned about when to hold an overnight trading position if I believed there was a possible gap and how to position myself for success by locking in my profits and taking advantage of momentum trading. The information on timing your trades was so valuable that I read it until I had it memorized.

I was now tuned to look for opportunities and carry my day trading to the next level. In fact I even found something called Level 2 day trading! I was so excited. As I picked apart the after hours tactics and settled in for an hour of learning I checked in my stocks and realized that for the first time ever I had made a profit in the stock market!

After I stood up and did my little happy dance I wanted to know what my next step was supposed to be. I had found profit in the stock market and couldn?t figure out if I was supposed to pocket it or use it toward more profits. A mouse click later and I was into the pages dealing with making the most of short stock opportunities.

Short stock opportunities appealed to me. I am not a patient person and the faster I can get something done the more often I do my happy dance. Short stock opportunities seemed like they were tailored exactly to my personality. For the next few weeks I focused hard on short stock opportunities and then once again tried to convince my better half that I was now a professional. The voice of reason and logic came barreling through again and I was quick to realize that while I learning to trade stocks effectively there was also a never ending sea of information out there all gathered into one website that I could very well never learn it all. And that was a good thing.

As much as I was pining to call myself a professional day trader, I never wanted to stop learning. The more I could learn about day trading the more confident I was and the higher quality decision were leaving my fingertips and running off through cyberspace. The high quality decisions I was learning to make were impacting our financial world quite healthily, and I was happy to keep going back to the website to learn more.

Day Trading is Not a Perfect Road

I was certainly doing my happy dance regularly, but let?s be realistic for a moment. Not every decision I made was perfect and there were a few instances where I lost a few bucks. The happy dance remained because I was still able to make quality decisions in the face of having made a poor one. And the truth be known, I made very few poor ones because the information provided on day trading was solid and reliable.

There are some basics, like learning which stocks to avoid and learning when the good trends are about to crumble that take more time and experience to learn. Sometimes you just have to go out there and make a mistake. Luckily for me I wasn?t making terribly costly mistakes. They could have been had I attempted the same trades without all the valuable knowledge I was gaining at ?onlinetradingideas?. This website literally gave me the power to make my own financial decisions and become a much more self sufficient day trader.

The most helpful section I read was learning to trade without making it a full time job. Although I was having fun, nobody wants to spend their entire life in front of a computer 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I wanted the small milestones of success, but I also wanted a life. I wanted bigger milestones of success, and I wanted to keep my life. I spent a good amount of time perusing other websites looking for stock trading information. There were other sites out there that had adequate information, but they all basically had me sitting in front of my computer all day every day in order to place my tickets and get my stocks in order. I still had a day job for crying out loud.

I soon realized that no other website was going to introduce me to success as quickly or reasonably as onlinetradingideas. Here I had the opportunity to pull ahead of the pack utilizing my two favorite methods of momentum trading and short stock opportunities.

One single website provided me with the information that I needed to learn how to efficiently and effectively trade stocks, keep my day job, pull ahead, and learn from the pros. I?m still working toward calling myself a professional day trader and I think I might get the title for my birthday. The articles have introduced me to phenomenal, life changing information, and there are ample links to more information right on the web pages themselves. There?s no monopoly of information, just a genuine desire to teach people like me how to break ahead in the stock market.