You can also sort stocks and ETFs to see which ones have the highest volume. Many websites like Yahoo Finance or MarketWatch offer stock screeners that you can start using today. If you’re not quite ready to be a prime-time player, you can always try paper trading with a stock market simulator first. Paper trading involves fake stock trades, which let you see how the market works before risking real money. You can also get a feel for the broker’s platform and functionality with this approach, in addition to seeing how theoretically profitable you’d be. This high-speed technique tries to profit on temporary changes in sentiment, exploiting the difference in the bid-ask price for a stock, also called a spread.

First, you can decide to be a scalper, where you buy or short and then exit within a short period at a profit. Time and sales, on the other hand, displays the volume of such orders. These are some of the stocks that you should focus on in a given day. Therefore, in this article, we will look at some of the best things to consider when picking stocks to trade. Place a stop-loss just below the most recent low prior to entry on a buy signal, or just above the most recent high prior to entry on a short signal. When you open a new, eligible Fidelity account with $50 or more.

Rules for Picking Stocks When Intraday Trading

You must have at least $25,000 in your brokerage account to qualify for pattern day trading. In the table above, you’ll see that many of the stocks and ETFs have a beta around 1.00. There are two that are well over 1.00 or under -1.00, and those are SQQQ and TQQQ. Both are leveraged ETFs that seek returns that are three times the return of the underlying index.

When entering a long position, buy after the price moves down toward the trendline and then moves back higher. To draw an upward trendline, a price low and then a higher price low is needed. The line is drawn connecting these two points and then extended out to the right. On the chart below, the price bounces off the trendline a couple of times before the price falls through it the third time. More trendlines can be drawn while trading in real time to see the varying degrees of each trend. Drawing in more trendlines may provide more signals and may also give greater insight into the changing market dynamics.

How is a Day Trader’s Workday Divided? Key Market Sessions!

Depth is also critical because it shows you how much liquidity a stock has at various price levels above—or below—the current market bid and offer. With a leveraged ETF like this, the index goes down, the ETF can go down three times as much. If the index goes up, a leverage ETF like this could go up three times as much. And with the SQQQ ETF, if an index goes down, it could go up (this is an inverse leveraged ETF). These types of funds can result in higher and lower returns than stocks or funds that are not leveraged, so invest with caution. Prices move quickly, often several percentage points in a day or several cents in seconds.

• We believe everyone should be able to make financial decisions with confidence.
• That’s because it’s easier to find buyers and sellers for the stock in question.
• Going global will give you access to foreign stocks and potentially cheaper alternatives.
• As to the best time to trade for profitability, theories abound, but what can’t be disputed is the concentration of trades that bookend the regular market session.
• Liquid stocks are more easily day-traded and tend to be more discounted than other stocks, making them cheaper.

Day traders can choose stocks that tend to move a lot, either in dollar terms or percentage terms. Trend trading refers to the general direction of a stock’s share price. The price could be continuously moving up or down, signifying an uptrend or downtrend. Trends can change, too, so it’s not the only way to analyze a stock or ETF. The normal trading strategies include conducting technical and fundamental analysis on stocks. In technical analysis, you use indicators like moving averages, Relative Strength Index (RSI), and MACD to determine whether to buy a stock or not.

Trend or Range When Day Trading Stocks

To know when to trade, day traders closely watch a stock’s order flow, the list of potential orders lining up to buy and sell a stock. Before buying, they’ll look for a stock to fall to “support,” a stock price at which other buyers step in to buy, and the stock is more likely to rise. To sell, they’ll look for when the stock hits “resistance,” a price where more traders start selling and the price is more likely to fall. To make judgments like this, you’ll want a broker that lets you see order flow. Day trading is defined as the practice of buying and selling financial assets with the goal of generating a profit. It differs from investing in that day traders believe in exiting their positions by the end of the day to avoid the substantial overnight risks.

The purchase is made close to the stop-loss level, which would be placed a few cents below the trendline or the most recent price low made just prior to entry. As mentioned, trends don’t continue indefinitely, so there will be losing trades. But as long as an overall profit is made, even with the losses, that is what matters.

How to Choose Stocks for Day Trading

Whichever strategy you pick, it’s important to find one (or more) that work and that you have the confidence to use. It can take a while to find a strategy that works for you, and even then the market may change, forcing you to change your approach. Our partners cannot pay us to guarantee favorable reviews of their products or services.

Bank of America’s trading volume is high, making it a relatively liquid stock. For the same reasons, Wells Fargo also makes for a very popular day-trading stock. Both of these stocks have high trading volumes and uncertain industrial conditions. Trendlines provide a simple and useful entry and stop-loss strategy. The following chart of the SPDR S&P 500 (SPY) shows several short-term trends during a typical day.

It’s easy to become enchanted by the idea of turning quick profits in the stock market, but day trading makes nearly no one rich — in fact, many people are more likely to lose money. Conversely, investors who buy and hold low-cost index funds that track a broad market index like the S&P 500 could see higher returns over a long period. Historically, the S&P 500 has an annualized total return of about 10%. To become a day trader you’ll first need to decide on a broker that fits your needs.