Learning To Day Trade With Ameritrade
Like any successful tradesperson, day traders need the right tools to survive and thrive. When you go down the educational journey to becoming a profitable day trader, what you need is not only lessons in the best stocks to find, but also the best platforms to use to trade. That is why you need to learn about Ameritrade and the Thinkorswim platform that the legendary trading website offers.
What is Day Trading
Day traders rely on volume and volatility. Making money at day trading requires making a lots of trades during the day, most of the time. Sometimes you can run swing trading strategies that mean that you are holding onto stocks for 3 days or so, but most of the time the meat and potatoes of day trading is a lot of little trades every day.
When you take a look at Ameritrade, the site offers traders a lot of great research, streaming news and other cool things. The Thinkorswim platform can show you economic data that can help inform your trades and it can sync the interface across your devices. Most day traders stay in front of their screens all day, but for the more modern traders with mobile access, you can get your device all the info you need. You can also setup custom alerts to the right places as you are trading.
How to Improve your Day Trading Skills
One of the coolest features, especially for beginning traders is the paper money option. That means you can make practice trades with virtual currency. That gives you a chance to see where your skills are at before you move on to trading real money. That can save you quite a bit of dough just starting out.
Practice is very important for any skill that you are trying to learn. Ask any veteran day trader and they will tell you that learning on the job is very expensive. Many of them would consider the first few years of their career as one long learning experience, which can get expensive. Think of it as losing the same amount of money to the market that you might spend on a mid-tier public university degree. Paper trading seems pretty inexpensive by comparison.
Advice from Veterans
Then the other part of learning to be a day trader comes from hanging out in day trading chat rooms. That is where you can interact with other traders that have been in the same position you have been in. These are people that are sharing your hopes and dreams and have been through the day trading ringer. Veteran traders that have seen it all. Even newbies that you can establish a relationship with.
Ameritrade has a chat room on Thinkorswim that can be a great resource for traders that are just starting out. If you want to ask a question or vet a trading idea that you just can’t quite crack, a day trading chat room can yield the answer. Without other people, day trading can get quite lonely. Spending time in a day trading chat room can be lucrative for your profits and beneficial for your mental health.