How To Day Trade Stocks | Strategies & Risks | Wealthsimple

Day trading is the rapid buying and selling of stocks — think minutes or hours rather than months or years — in order to profit off of price swings. It’s a risky business that often uses leverage (borrowed funds), with the potential for huge returns. To give yourself the best possible chance at success, you’ll have to be prepared. Maybe just as important: you’ll have to get lucky.

To get started, you’ll first have to learn about the market you’re going to be trading in. If you already have special knowledge of a particular industry, that can be the best place to focus. If you don’t have any special knowledge, well, it’s time to do some studying. Otherwise you’re just guessing.

You’ll also need a strategy. There are quite a few, which we’ll walk you through below. And then, of course, you’ll want to know and set your own goals and limits. Without them, it can be more tempting than ever to chase losses well beyond your means.

Here’s how to start day trading in the smartest way possible.

What is day trading?

In simple terms, day trading involves buying and selling stocks within a trading day. It’s “buy low, sell high” on energy drinks and with a deadline. Day traders focus on liquid investments that fluctuate quickly. Buys are made in volume and then sold as the price hopefully increases throughout the day.

Day trading is about timing the market, and that requires experience, knowledge, a lot of luck, and the understanding that it still may not work out. Day traders need nerves of steel. Day trading is a high-risk strategy and one that’s not suited to most investors. While your investments could increase in value, they could also drop significantly. Many day traders have lost everything because they misread the market. Still not turned off? Alright then…

How to start day trading

If you want to start day trading, you’ll probably need to do some research and planning. Here is some information to help you get into the day trading game.

1. Learn the market.

Before you invest one dollar in day trading, make sure you understand what you are (literally) signing up for. It’s not enough to have a general understanding of the stock market; you need to understand how world events can affect volatility, how trades work, how different industries respond, and how to anticipate fluctuations. Many day traders specialize in a specific industry.

2. Develop a strategy.

There are many different day trading strategies, and there are courses and online references that can help you understand the process, methodology, and risk/return. Start by studying actual trades and strategies. You might find a contrarian strategy or maybe trend following. Just know that all trading styles are based on speculation. You can find many free resources online that allow you to watch live trades, study stock charts and trends, and read financial analyses. How would you handle the trade? When would you sell, how much are you willing to risk, how would you make out if you employed your trading strategy?

3. Set up a demo account.

Before you start risking real money, set up a demo account to learn the ropes. You can buy and sell in real time, but in a safe space as you learn more about reading the market, the trends and fluctuations, how much to risk, and at what point. Practice, practice, practice. You can develop, hone, and perfect your strategy in a demo environment that won’t cost you your house if you get it wrong. Keep testing your strategy until you are confident.

4. Set goals and know your limits.

It takes time to learn day trading. Especially when you start trading with real capital. You need to trade while markets are open: missing a sell because you didn’t execute the transaction before the exchange closed could be a costly lesson if the stock/future/currency fluctuates overnight.

While most companies will not understand that you need to leave a meeting to execute a trade, we’re not recommending giving up your day job. That shouldn’t happen until your profits consistently exceed your take-home pay.

Especially at the beginning, you need to set a realistic limit on the money you are willing to spend on day trading. If it’s money you cannot afford to lose, then day trading may not be for you. No strategy or investment methodology will protect you from a stock market implosion due to an unforeseen event. Just like gambling, the lure of the win can be intoxicating, but it can also be a siren song to bankruptcy and foreclosure. Many people have tried to trade their way out of a hole, only to panic, stop reading the market (or find they were unable to), and find themselves in a much bigger hole.

5. Find out the tax implications.

It’s best to know going in how your day trading profits will be treated at tax time, so talk to your financial advisor, accountant, or a tax specialist. In many countries, the tax treatment may depend on whether you are seen as an “investor” or a “trader” who does this for a living. There may be rules around the length of time between trades, how capital gains and losses are treated, and what qualifies you to be a professional day trader.

6. Choose a broker.

Any day trading activity is conducted through an investment platform, so this is one of the most important steps you can take before starting to day trade. Not only will this broker be in charge of your account, but you will be executing your trades through their trading platform, and when timing matters, it needs to be reliable. Reputation and expertise matter, so take the time to find the right fit for you and your goals.

How to choose a broker for day trading

One of the most important decisions you will have to make before you start day trading is choosing the broker who will handle your account. Here are some tips for doing it right:

1. Decide what you will be trading.

Different brokers have different areas of expertise. A FOREX (foreign currency) broker may do stock trading, or vice versa. Find someone who deals in the area you want to specialize in.

2. Get recommendations.

Talk to other day traders to see what stock trading platforms they recommend. Like any industry, reputation matters, but never more so than when it’s your money on the line. Check online reviews, discussion boards, and social media content; ask your colleague for recommendations; and take the time to examine day trading websites.

3. Ask for references or read reviews.

Check the credentials of the trading platform with their regulatory agency to see if they have had any actions or complaints against them. How long have they been in business, how many employees do they have, and how long have they been handling day trading accounts? The last thing you need as a new day trader is a broker who doesn’t abide by the rules.

4. Check fees and commissions.

Nothing can eat away a profit faster than commissions and admin fees. Large-volume trades could have thousands of dollars in commission fees. There are some stock trading platforms that offer commission-free trading, which reduces the costs of trading significantly.

5. Investigate the technology.

Day trading relies on quick actions and reactions. Is your broker’s trading platform up to the challenge? What trading platform do they use and what kinds of accounts do they deal with? Since day trading relies on timing the market, does the broker offer a real-time data feed so you can track your activity easily? How quickly do they respond to trade requests? How many day trading accounts do they have, what kind of volume of trade do they typically handle, and what kinds of safeguards and cybersecurity measures do they have in place?

6. Find out if they offer customer service.

What kinds of tools and analyses do they provide to their clients? Are they strictly a clearing house for your activities or are they going to provide support to help you make the most of your trading activity? What is the process and what is their complaint resolution practice? What happens if their system crashes mid-trade and it costs you a fortune? If there is a keying error, what does the contract say about liability? People never read that section of a contract until it’s too late. (Make sure you read the whole contract and ask questions to ensure you understand what you are signing.)

Day trading strategies

Before we dive into the most commonly used day trading strategies, remember: they are highly speculative. When you buy, you’re betting the stock will go up. There’s a seller on the other end of that transaction betting the stock price will fall. Nobody truly knows if the value of a stock will go up or down. As you may have guessed, only one person in this buy/sell scenario will be right and there are many people that lose out when engaging in day trading strategies. That said, here are some of the most commonly used strategies.

Trend Following: This might be the most straightforward of all the trading strategies. Basically, the aim is to buy an asset when its price trend goes up and sell when its trend goes down, expecting price movements to continue.

Range Trading: With this strategy, traders work within a particular range by looking at the price and volume charts of a stock to identify typical highs and lows during the day. With this information, the trader simply buys low and sells high.

Contrarian Investing: Basically, you buy and sell stock contrary to the prevailing attitude at the time. This strategy rests on the belief that crowd behavior can lead to overestimating or mispricing assets, and that going against popular opinion will result in better prices.

Scalping: This strategy relies on profiting off small price changes, generally after a trade is executed and becomes profitable. The attitude here is to make as many small profits as possible.

News Trading: News trading may be the most traditional of trading strategies. Instead of looking at a stock’s price as it rises and falls throughout the day, a trader will look at the news in hopes of finding information that will affect a stock’s price. This can be a company announcement about earnings or new products, a general economic news item about interest rates or unemployment, or just plain old industry rumours.

Price Action: Price action is a trading technique that focuses more on a stock’s recent and past price movements, upon which the trader then makes a selling or buying decision. This strategy relies a lot on technical analysis tools to discern pricing patterns.

Chart Patterns: Chart patterns refer to price formations represented in a graphical way. A trader uses these charts in order to analyze the market and make specific buying or selling choices.

Technical Analysis: By using technical analysis to recognize trends in the market, a trader can use that information to make decisions on when to buy and sell. The premise of this strategy is that prices move in trends, and that those trends repeat themselves over time. By using existing information of price trends throughout the trading day, a technical analysis strategy attempts to predict future price movements.

Types of orders for day trading

When you want to buy or sell a stock, you execute an order. This is easily done online on your online brokerage account, but before you can go ahead, you’ll need to choose what kind of order you want to execute. Here are the different options:

Market Order: This is the most common and fastest type of order, which involves you usually going through a brokerage to buy or sell a security at the best available price in the current market.

Limit Order: A limit order is an order to buy or sell a stock at a specific price or better. A buy limit order can be executed only at the limit price or lower, and a sell limit order can be executed only at the limit price or higher. If the price isn’t reached, then your trade might not be executed.

Stop Order: A stop order, also referred to as a stop-loss order, is an order to buy or sell a stock once the price of the stock reaches a specified price, known as the stop price. When the stop price is reached, a stop order becomes a market order.

How much money do you need to start day trading?

Day trading requires capital, and many day traders borrow funds to make the purchases, a practice known as “leveraging” or trading “on margin.” They make a series of trades to maximize their return, counting on selling at a profit that will cover the cost of the loan and still make a profit. If they misjudge the movement of the market, they could lose their profit and be on the hook for the loan.

Professional day traders work with risk capital, investing only what they can afford to lose (often no more than 1% of their account balance). Rookie day traders often learn this lesson the hard way, and some have lost everything trying to time a market they didn’t understand. (For a majority of people, passive investing can be the best strategy, with day trading accounting for only a small part of their overall portfolio.)

Day traders also need access to ready capital to react quickly to the changes in the market throughout the trading day. Different types of trading require different minimums.

If you are interested in trading in FOREX, there is no legal minimum for an account. However, currency is traded in lots, and the minimum trading lot is 1,000 units of whatever foreign currency lot you are interested in. You need enough in your account to purchase the minimum, without wiping out your account in the process. Like stocks, currencies can fluctuate wildly and are sensitive to world events. A knowledge of world politics and international trade is helpful if you want to get into FOREX trading.

If you want to be a day trader in stocks, in Canada, there is no prescribed minimum. That said, because the United States requires day traders to have a minimum of $25,000 on hand, your broker may require you to adhere to a similar rule if you are buying securities that settle in the U.S.

If you want to day trade futures contracts, most brokers require a minimum account balance of $1,000, but $8,000 to $10,000 is recommended by many providers. Since most day traders won’t risk more than 1% of the value of their account on any one trade, $1,000 will not give you enough capital to make the trade worth your while.

The risks of day trading

You always need to keep in mind that high-risk strategy and you could lose some, or even all, of the money you put in. Because day trading requires a keen understanding of the market and benefits those with experience, it’s also generated many scams that promise enormous returns in a short period of time and end up wiping your savings out instead. Day trading is not for everyone, and you should do a lot of research and make sure you understand what you’re doing before getting involved.

Alternatives to day trading

If all this risk turns you off of day trading, there are other activities that you can do to try to increase profits. If you’ll allow us a little self-promotion, you should know that robo-advisors create a personalized investment portfolio for you so that you hardly have to lift a finger. One of the less risky strategies that still allows you to invest in the stock market is to buy stocks and hold them for a longer period of time.

As you learn more about how the stock market rises and falls, you will gain knowledge that could help you day trade down the road. In the meantime, you could be increasing the value of your assets. You can also follow the market passively by investing in index mutual funds or exchange-traded funds with an automated investment platform. They generally seek to match the performance and return of a particular stock market index. You set it and forget it, and the algorithms do the rest, rebalancing your portfolio to stay within your investment direction and level of risk comfort you have.