Plainview's Stock Trading Thread...

Bought 100 shares Pfizer middle of the day yesterday. Bought it at $35 a share and sold it at $36 a share today. Profit total isn't a lot, $99.92, but the % gain was awesome, 2.85%. It's not about the amount total. It's about the % gain in the end. It hasn't been above $38 for a while and I was happy with the % game. Only learning experience from it was I could have invested more in it, and should have, but didn't. In the end, 2.8% gain is all that matters!

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Plainview So I’ve always been interested in this, and I have some good sources (my uncle is very high up in Merrill Lynch, for one), but I have no idea how to start on my own.

Suggestions?
 
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Rollins said:
Plainview So I’ve always been interested in this, and I have some good sources (my uncle is very high up in Merrill Lynch, for one), but I have no idea how to start on my own.

Suggestions?
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You have to decided what type of a trader you want to be. Are you someone who wants to buy and sell a lot, or are you someone who wants to buy, hold on for a while, and sell when it's hopefully gone up substantially, or are you someone who is looking for longer term investments? The days of getting in very low and exploding are long gone.

I guess you can consider me a day trader that holds on to never sell for a loss. True day traders are complete out of holdings by the bell. They don't hold anything overnight and have a loss guard on almost every trade to automatically sell if they hit a certain percentage down. That's not me. I will sell and trade in a minute if a stock pops. If it's down, or hasn't reached a good return %, I have no problems holding onto a stock. To be able to trade daily and frequently, you need a minimum of $25,000 portfolio value to do that. If not, you'll most likely be the second person I described above.

Me, I have long term mutual funds in a retirement account. Then, I have my "day trading" account. I don't touch the retirement account. I should have dumped all of the mutual funds back in March and threw it all into Apple, Amazon, etc. I would have probably tripled my retirement portfolio. I was too scared as to where the world was going.

I can delve deeper into the metrics of everything, but I don't feel like thinking more when I'm trading. I may do it in the future. There are a couple of really good trading chat rooms. Most are s*** and scams run by dudebro traders that gather together and drive a stock up and dump it. They did it with Tesla, not sure how it hasn't collapse yet tough. It's something I spend an hour or so on during the day at work, if even that. It's very easy to set a buy limit and an automatic exit. It just takes a little thought to see where things are and where you think they will go.

For good overall education, Investopedia. They cover a lot of subjects.
This is a "trading" introduction. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/trading/05/011705.asp
This is an "investing" introduction. https://www.investopedia.com/investing-essentials-4689754
 
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Day trading sounds like too much babysitting.
 
Hedon said:
Day trading sounds like too much babysitting.
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It can be, but it's really not. Right now I have a buy on Ford for 1000 shares at $5.75 (Day) with an automatic exit at $6.00 (GTC "Good til cancelled". That mens it will automatically buy if the stock hits $5.75 TODAY ONLY, and it will be held until the stock hits $6.00. If this was my job, I'd spend much more time on it. I could easily do that, but I don't. I spend a MAX of two hours a day, a MAX, looking at what to do for the day. That's total though out the day.
 
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Plainview said:
It can be, but it's really not. Right now I have a buy on Ford for 1000 shares at $5.75 (Day) with an automatic exit at $6.00 (GTC "Good til cancelled". That mens it will automatically buy if the stock hits $5.75 TODAY ONLY, and it will be held until the stock hits $6.00. If this was my job, I'd spend much more time on it. I could easily do that, but I don't. I spend a MAX of two hours a day, a MAX, looking at what to do for the day. That's total though out the day.
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I could see like 10 minutes max a day dinking around. I should check out the app you use.
 
Hedon said:
I see Fidelity is a recommended app too.
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Nothing compared to a desktop app. You can have an incredible amount of data on one screen. You’ll be swiping for minutes to to access what I can in a second. Phone apps are great set it and forget it.
 
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Plainview said:
Nothing compared to a desktop app. You can have an incredible amount of data on one screen. You’ll be swiping for minutes to to access what I can in a second. Phone apps are great set it and forget it.
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Yeah but I have no idea what you said about your set up
 
Hedon said:
Yeah but I have no idea what you said about your set up
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I can see the %change from close, %change from open, %5 day change, %1 month change volume, ask, bid, current price of 50 stocks in one second. Add a second if I want to see the news of a particular stock, the days trend.
 
Plainview said:
I can see the %change from close, %change from open, %5 day change, %1 month change volume, ask, bid, current price of 50 stocks in one second. Add a second if I want to see the news of a particular stock, the days trend.
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No I mean about the app and Mac and whatever else you did to get whatever to run on your computer
 
Hedon said:
No I mean about the app and Mac and whatever else you did to get whatever to run on your computer
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There’s no native Mac app. It has to run inside Citrix. It’s Schwab’s platform. Most houses have the same set of tools. Some
Run in a browser.
 
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Bought 100 shares of AMD two days ago, again, at $52.50. Sold today at $53.50 for $99.76 net profit which is a 1.9% gain. Modest in amount, nice in percentage. Bought Intel at same time. I was up and just narrowly missed my sell price. Hope it goes back up today.

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First trade this week. Stocks were up a lot this week, for very little reason, and I didn't feel comfortable entering. Today, bought 100 shares of Ralph Lauren for $73 and sold them about 20 minutes later for $76. Net profit is 4.11%. VERY nice. I wish I had bought 250 shares like I originally wanted to. It's dropping again, and if it hits $73, I may buy again.

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I really don't have any sort of a system when almost all stocks are up for the day. I am going to do some research and see how the market should be played by kinda day traders when the market is up. A lot of them use momentum as their trade and then dump. I'm not quite comfortable with that approach. I will read and see what I can figure out.
 
Loved reading this thread. I am a big time stock lurker. I was about to toss $2K of student loans when I was in college into tech stocks, then the bubble burst. I felt lucky that I didn't pull the trigger, and have been a wuss about stocks ever since. However, I still love to track stocks and fantasize about making money in the market.
 
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I bought 100 shares of Ralph Lauren again Friday a $73.25 per share. Sold it at the bell for $78.02 for a net profit $476.83 and 6.51% profit. I'm glad I didn't reduce my sell price yesterday. I currently have 100 shares of IBM, bought at $123 on Friday as well, with a sell price of $127. I may change that sell price to $128. Let's see how it moves today. I'll most likely keep it at the $127 sell price as it's up, but flatlining right now.

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Ok, sold IBM as well. Lowered the sell price to $126.50. It was flatlining and there's no reason to try to push for and extra $50. Net profit is $349.72 and 2.84%. That brings a total net profit today of $826.55. I can't really ask for a better stock trading day.

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Currently have a purchase price of Ford at $6.25 per share for 1000 shares. It may hit that today. It's previous close was $6.50 and it's been dropping since the bell after the overnight jump.
 
Whew! Got my profit at the right time. Everything is dropping close to previous close. Not sure what happened? I don't see any news.
 
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