Determination and investing your time

Chapter 1. Determination and investing your time

Reading time: 3-5 minutes (822 words)

Let’s get straight to the point. Becoming a successful day trader that is making consistent profits over long periods of time will cost you a lot of time. You need to learn a lot about various subjects and need to backtest everything before you can put real money in your trades. If you are completely new to day trading or investing, I suggest you read our starting guide first. 

If you don’t have hundreds or thousands of hours of free time to spend on learning day trading you should stop reading this guide and find a more easier approach. 95% of day traders fail because of this reason. People don’t want to spend the time or will try to find shortcuts. As mentioned in my starting guide mentioned above, there are no shortcuts. You have to spend hundreds or thousands of hours to become profitable on a consistent basis. Let this sink in a little bit. Is this really what you want? Because it would be a waste of time if you quit halfway. This will be one for the long run. 

1.1 Create your schedule

You are still here, great. Let’s start with finding the time in your schedule so you can improve your skills on a daily basis. With a detailed plan you are much more determined to follow the plan. You need to absorb much information that goes way beyond the scope of this guide. This guide is only the beginning. It will all make sense when you have read the whole guide. For now, start to work on consuming information on a daily basis. This also means you might have to make sacrifices. If you are working forty hours a week and have a family then you might have a hard time finding hundreds or thousands of hours of free time. That means you have to do the work before you go to work or in the evening or weekends. That might mean that you have to cancel the boys or girls weekends where you go out drinking. Don’t take this lightly, if you don’t have much free time, you have to make sacrifices. 

That’s why this guide starts with this important topic. If you are not willing to spend time and, if needed, make sacrifices you will probably end up like 95% of day traders that lose money. It’s not actually hard to day trade getting profits on a consistent basis. You just need to spend a lot of time learning the process. First, take a look at your schedule. Try to find free time and mark those spots. If you can’t find many spots because you don’t have much free time then look at the things you can cut out. You should spend at least five to six hours on a weekly basis. If you really can’t spend more than six hours a week that is fine. It just simply takes more time before you can start trading with real money. Also, keep in mind when you are actually daytrading you need to look at the charts at specific times. Most traders have specific trading days where they do their analysis and look at charts all day or for a few hours depending on the strategy.

1.2 Consistency

Day trading is all about being consistent. Over time you will notice trading days are behaving differently. For example, when you trade stocks on the opening day of the market (monday), the market behaves differently than a mid week trading day like wednesday. You can only see these kinds of patterns when you are very consistently looking at charts and using the same indicators over and over. You should treat your schedule the same way. If you are consistently putting in time it will become a habit. You don’t have to be passionate about day trading. Most people find it a chore to look at charts and numbers all day. Just be consistent as possible in spending time learning. This will be very beneficial in the future because day trading is all about staying consistent. Doing the same things over and over again.

Once you get more familiar with your strategy you can use alerts to avoid being on the charts all day. And, if you happen to be a developer, you might even script your strategy. Scripting has huge advantages over manual trading. But it’s very hard to script and most people are not developers. The chances are pretty big that you have to look at the charts. But that’s totally fine. For now, make day trading a part of your lifestyle. Your off at a good start by reading this guide.