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7 Secrets To Day Trading

Written By

William Berg

Written By

William Berg

William contributes to several investment websites, leveraging his experience as a consultant for IPOs in the Nordic market and background providing localization for forex trading software. William has worked as a writer and fact-checker for a long row of financial publications.

» William Berg Profile Page

Fact Checked By

Tobias Robinson

Fact Checked By

Tobias Robinson

Tobias is a partner at DayTrading.com, director of a UK limited company and active trader. He has over 25 years of experience in the financial industry and contributed via CySec to the regulatory response to digital options and CFD trading in Europe. Toby’s expertise and dedication to financial education make him a trusted voice in the industry, including a BBC investigation into digital options.

» Tobias Robinson Profile Page

Updated

Jul 24, 2024

Why you need to know these exposed day trading secrets – every day the markets offer a multitude of opportunities for potential trades. However, only a small minority consistently manage to make profit. What is this ‘in-crowd’ doing that the rest of the market is not? Perhaps they are utilising the best, but often not so well-known methods and resources. Fortunately, the day trading secrets below may reveal some of those invaluable tricks.

1. Knowledge Is Power

With instant communication, an event the other side of the world can quickly affect your market. As a result, having access to reliable news sources is more important than ever. However, some resources go above and beyond reporting breaking news. They also offer in-depth insight and commentary. All of which may enhance your ability to predict future price movement.

So, one of the best-kept secrets of day trading is Financial Juice. Once you have signed up for a free user account, live news will be audibly read out as it breaks. Making staying up to date with events that may impact your market straightforward and effortless. This all makes it one of the best day trading secrets to be revealed.

However, if you’re looking for additional commentary and insight, you may want to consider several other of the top options currently available:

• Ransquawk
• Trade the News
• Benzinga Pro

All three offer high-quality financial analysis that can help cut your research times. However, unlike Financial Juice, they come at a cost. Fortunately, you can sign up for a free trial to see which one is the right fit for you.

So, if you want to assert and maintain an edge over the rest of the market, utilise Financial Juice or one of the other options listed above.

2. Economic Calendars

The next of our day trading secrets to be exposed is a tool often overlooked by traders, an economic calendar. They simply track the occurrence of market-moving events. Yet when used correctly, they can also help you to anticipate and organise a plan around a future occasion.

They will break down key influential events, including:

• Interest rate decisions
• Non-farm payroll numbers
• GDP announcements
• Consumer Price Index (CPI)
• Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI)

An economic calendar will also instil discipline and organisation. Two extremely important qualities day traders should develop.

But utilising an economic calendar, in general, isn’t the best-kept secret. Instead, it’s using the tool Price Alerts that is. Their easy-to-use app allows traders to follow all worldwide economic events in real-time via their Economic Calendar.

You can develop tailor-made alert systems. The calendar comes with country and importance filters. Plus, you aren’t required to log in or hand over any personal information. Not to mention, it’s totally free.

3. Enhanced Analysis

eSignal

Some say you are only as good as your technical analysis. That is why ensuring you have powerful charts and tools at your disposal is vital. It is also why in this list of 7 secrets to day trading success, eSignal deserves a mention.

Whilst the standard charts you get from your broker will make do for a while, eSignal is the place to go when you are ready to upgrade.

You have the ability to draw and write custom formulas. Once custom scripts have been installed, they can then be used as indicators for reversals and drawing support/resistance lines. eSiganl also runs smoothly, enabling you to load charts on numerous monitors without any lag.

On top of that, the financial media and social integration features allow you to instantly connect to information and experienced traders. Bouncing ideas off other traders can prove an effective way to hone an advanced day trading scalping strategy, for example.

NinjaTrader

If you’re looking for the inside track, NinjaTrader charting software is another of the relatively unknown trading secrets. NinjaTrader gives everything from order entry to execution. But what separates it from the rest is the customisability. Not to mention the third-party library integration that makes over 300 add-on products compatible.

So, with over 100+ technical indicators and advanced charting capabilities, you are in a better position to interpret and react to market data than others.

The only downside is that unlike many of the secrets above, NinjaTrader is not free. However, it remains a sensible choice nonetheless.

For more information, see our NinjaTrader page.

4. Practice Makes Perfect

Profiting from intraday price fluctuations requires more than knowledge. It also requires practice. Too many people lose their hard-earned capital from early mistakes that would have been best made in a demo account. So, these practice accounts are the perfect place to get familiar with market conditions and hone a strategy.

In fact, one of the top day trading success secrets is to run prospective strategies through a simulator account first. Funded with virtual money, you can identify flaws and improve your technique until it generates consistent profits. Then you can apply it to a live account.

However, demo accounts alone aren’t one of the best insider day trading secrets. The secret is using the Oanda practice account.

Signing up is quick and hassle-free. It comes with zero fees and can be used for an unlimited time. This ensures you don’t have to risk your own capital until you feel confident. You can also choose between the popular MetaTrader 4 platform or their own proprietary platform. In addition, you can access your demo account via a mobile app.

But one of the greatest selling points is the access to their advanced auto-charting feature, ‘Autochartist’. This allows you to build and improve a strategy using highly sophisticated tools and technical analysis.

This all means Oanda demo accounts should feature on any day trading secrets revealed PDF.

For further guidance, see our demo accounts page.

5. Trade Diary Secrets

Too many traders are concerned with quantity and forget to sit down and look at the quality of their trades. Neglecting the need to figure out where and why they are going wrong. This is why in my secrets of day trading in stocks or any other instrument, keeping a journal with TradeBench toward the top.

TradeBench is a totally free online trade journal. You can plan trades, position sizes and it comes with risk management software. Most importantly though, it keeps a detailed record of previous trades, including:

• Entry & exit points
• Data of trade
• Time of open & close
• Position size
• Profit/loss

This allows you to easily look back and identify flaws in your strategy. While others will continue to make the same mistakes, you can continuously improve.

So, in any day trading secrets PDF, opening a journal with TradeBench should feature high on the list.

6. Staying Neutral

It’s barely lunchtime and you’ve just lost $500 on a trade. Now you’re doubting your carefully formulated plan. On the flip side, when you’re significantly up, holding onto that winning position feels like the right thing to do, regardless of your strategy.

But as successful trader Victor Sperandeo correctly asserted, “The key to trading success is emotional discipline. If intelligence were the key, there would be a lot more people making money.” However, developing monk-like discipline is hardly amongst the top 15 secrets to day trading success. Instead, the secret is knowing how to develop that emotional discipline.

To do that, you need to take a well-rounded approach and follow all of the steps below:

10 Steps to Mental Success

1. Stops – You must respect your stops. They compel you to take a minute and focus on where and why you went wrong.
2. Consistency – You must outline your strategy at the beginning and stick to it thereafter. Trust in your research and data.
3. Start small – Focus on big wins and you forget the importance of following the pattern. Over the long run, taking smaller positions will give you greater control. Then you can gradually increase your position size as your confidence grows.
4. Lifestyle – You must find a plan that fits around your lifestyle. Looking at 50 charts when you only have time for 5 is a guaranteed way to waste time and stress. Instead, concentrate on a few very good opportunities.
5. Noise reduction – It’s all too easy to get bogged down in huge volumes of microdata. Breathe for a minute and focus your energy on the overarching picture.
6. Realistic goals – This is one of the best trading secrets. Unrealistic profit targets will quickly lead to reckless decision making. So, set yourself small and realistic goals, particularly to start with.
7. Cutting losses – Going on autopilot and getting out is essential when threatened with big losses. So, prepare mentally and visualise that emergency exit. As Bruce Kovner highlighted, “if you personalise losses, you can’t trade.”
8. Learn from the best – Pick up books on developing discipline. The Disciplined Trader by Mark Douglas is a great place to start.
9. Trust yourself – Whilst chatrooms and forums can be useful, don’t allow yourself to be overly influenced. Spend too much time on them and you will quickly doubt your strategy when your capital is on the line.
10. Overall picture – Fix your bad habits and practice building that willpower in all aspects of life. You will then find staying neutral when you trade is far easier.

7. Going Automated

Once you have a consistently effective strategy, automation can be used to enhance your returns. This is because you can only make a certain number of trades manually each day. Whilst an algorithm can execute a large number of trades as soon as pre-determined criteria have been met.

In the automation world, AlgoTrader is one of the best-kept secrets. It was designed by industry experts and gives you maximum control of high-speed, fact-based automated systems.

The system is exceptionally fast, processing up to 500,000 events per second. The open-source architecture also allows for substantial customisation. Third party libraries can be integrated and the built-in features help reduce costs, increasing your profit margin.

The built-in features include, but are not limited to:

• Execution algorithms
• Option pricing engine
• Historical data download
• Excel based backtesting reports
• Automated parameter optimisation

The reliability, support and wide range of features separate it from much of the offerings currently available. This all means that if we had 15-day trading secrets to success, AlgoTrader would be towards the top.

For more information, see the pages on Automated Trading and AlgoTrader.

Final Word on Secrets

Even with the above intraday trading secrets, generating consistent profits is no straightforward task. Whilst some tools work well for some, they can leave others no better off. The trick is finding the above-listed secrets to day trading that compliment your individual trading style.

Further Reading

Books

• “Day Trading Secrets”, Harvey Walsh
• “Day Trading Exposed: Secrets of the Pros Exposed”, Joe DiChristophoro
• “Electronic Day Traders’ Secrets: Learn from the Best of the Best Day Traders”, Marc Friedfertig, George West, Jonathan Burton