Is there such a thing? Day trading has its moments and trades that can be considered easier. I really believe this, but how does one find these trades during the day? It takes preparation, experience, and persistence to find easy opportunities.
The preparation is the hard work put in every day looking at chart after chart, drawing trend lines, and setting alerts. The experience is the result of surviving the learning curve because you took the preparation seriously even though everything wasn’t working out exactly as you thought it would. The persistence is the discipline of doing what it takes to find and exploit these opportunities.
Easy trades are out there but what precedes them isn’t easy. I love easy trades, and I pride myself on being able to find them and trade them. I work hard every day to find them. I understand that my definition of an easy trade may be different from other traders due to differences in experience and skill level, but they are out there for every level of trader. I firmly believe that making the choice to find them is the first step.
Here is my number one idea to get you started on your way to finding the easy trades. STAY AWAY FROM BATTLEGROUND STOCKS!! If a stock is a battleground of traders all warring and flexing their muscles to be right, just avoid it. When a stock is in an area where the guys that move stocks are in hand-to-hand combat let them battle it out, not you.
Avoid that feeling of the need to be right. I am always perplexed as to why an intraday trader lets the need to be right or smarter trump making money. I see this need in novice intraday traders all the time. Start to cultivate your professional level patience and leave the novice ranks behind. Let one side or the other start to win in a recognizable way and get in on the easy trade. Until you can get that professional level patience you may find yourself on the other side of my easy trade.
Jeff Davis @Shaq48_Trading
9 Comments on “The Elusive Easy Trade”
Hello.
I’d like to say “yes” there are easy trades.
I want to refer to the chapter “Scoring” in One Good Trade: I put all my trades into an Excel table. In the the Comment column I write what kind of setup it was.
Over the course of weeks I saw which setups rather messed me up, and others where I made a good profit.
And those now are the setups that I focus on each day. I find those are really easy trades. But yeah, it does take persistance to sit and wait until they show. That’s the part that’s not so easy – not at all.
Because if one of your easy trades don’t show up, you try to read something into the market which is not.
But hell, Mike Bellafiore wtih One Good Trade and all of you here at SMB Blog did a great job to make me a better trader. And I’m working on msyself every day.
I should still work on the setups that don’t work for me because their premise I think is still good.
For example breakout trades – I can’t do those. You once posted a video on breakouts. And I wanted to say hey they don’t work. But in hindsight they all look good. That means the initial idea is good, otherwise I wouldn’t have put it into my list of setups, even when I fail to execute on them properly.
So great Thanks to all of you.
Linus
For me all trades are equally hard to take. Once you pull the trigger it’s what happens after the entry that makes it hard or easy. The trades that almost immediately go in your direction and hit your target are easy. It’s the ones that flirt with your stop or even immediately stop out that are hard. Too many of those in a row and it starts making the next trade harder to take.
Can you give an example of your definition of an easy trade?
Keep the losses like paper cuts as in my blog post. If the chosen trade is not a battle and the winner is clear it just becomes about finding entry and if the winning side is clear with some professional patience you should find and exploit an easy trade. Of course experience counts, but when you specifically search for those types of trades they pay off both p/l wise and mentally.
TIF today on the hold above 67.25 on a bullish day in the market..I tweeted about TIF numerous times
Yeps. technical level on the higher time frames… high&tight flag and breakout =) VERY CLEAN! didn’t see this at all. following you on twitter now =)
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you have set a place where they can truly handle things for good matter,, well take that one for good,.
you have set a place where they can truly handle things for good matter,, well take that one for good,.