Day Trading Against System Trading

What a day trader does is he restricts his investments to a day. This means that whatever he buys on the day he sells on the same day. The philosophy is there is hardly any chance of a stocks hitting rock bottom over the space of a day.

So even if there are losses, it will be marginal. Of course, the profits are also limited since stocks get hardly the time to gain value in just a day. Of course there are exceptions when stocks plummet or shoot-up in hours. But those are generally irregularities.

However there are a few issues with day trading. First of all, when someone invests on the stock market there is generally a hope for high returns. Day trading runs counter to that philosophy. Of course you can make high profits even in day trading but for that you will need huge capital where you can pump in money to buy rising stocks, and then sell them at the end of the day when the stocks have gone higher. It is the number of stocks you buy that makes the most difference and not the change in the price of the stock.

Also day traders discount the history and performance of a stock. When a day trader buys stock in a particular company, he will try to buy the ones which have shown profit in the recent past. But it might happen that on the day he bought the stock it showed a marginal decrease.

There is every promise for the stock to again gain momentum and go up. But the day trader has to sell the stock cause as a day trader you cannot hold on to any stock at the end of the day. So while you were almost certain of profit over a period of time, you end up making a loss just because of the weird way day trading works.

The basics of system trading is quite simple. What you need to do is fix certain parameters on when to buy a stock and when to let it go. It is like a guide book that you follow by the word. Now these parameters should be made based on a lot of research and inputs from successful traders.

Once you have it ready, your emotions play little role in the trading. You now know exactly when to buy and when to sell. And this is where system trading brings some sense to the erratic trading of amateurs who are into online trading.