If you want stock market trading tips from the pro’s, listen up because I’m going to give you some. These tips will probably knock most normal people out of this business of trading for a living. But listen up, because it might save you a lot of money, time and tears.
First of all, use money that you can afford to lose when stock market trading. This is a very important point. You can invest your money that you can’t afford to lose. If it’s for retirement or college tuition, investing in stocks is not a problem, so long as it makes sense.
Use money that you can survive without. So if you need the money to pay your bills, don’t use it. It’s that simple. If you use money you need to live your life, you will have an unhealthy attachment to it that will affect your stock market trading and will usurp your strategies.
In addition, if you use money you can’t afford to lose on day trading, you are basically gambling. This is especially true if you are new to trading. That is because it is highly likely that you will bust your first or second trading accounts in the process of learning.
Trading is not like investing where you find stocks to buy and hold and your capital is pretty much protected on the most part. With trading, you could lose the whole thing in a single day.
Use Leverage – But Cautiously
Unless you have $100,000 to trade in the stock market, you really won’t make enough money to live off of. Even with $100K, you’ll be lucky if you make enough to pay your rent. And that’s if you’re good.
That means you will need to use leverage. Leverage is when you borrow money from your broker so you can buy more shares in a stock than you can with cash.
Again this is very risky because if a trade goes against you, you’ll need to have a large enough deposit so you don’t get margin called out of the trade by your broker.
Stock Futures
An alternative way to trade stocks with leverage is by trading stock futures. Most of the big stocks have futures contracts that are traded associated with it as the underlying security.
You can also trade what are called e-mini’s. These are futures contracts with the entire S&P 500 index as the underlying security.
E-mini’s are useful because if you were to trade a standard S&P 500 ETF, like the SPDR, you wouldn’t make much money. The S&P 500 usually changed 1-2% a day. Those are very low returns unless you are trading $100K positions. E-mini’s are a good way to get more of a return on less movement in the market.
There are many other strategies that you can use to trade the stock market. These are just a few suggestions. Just remember to use money you can afford to lose. That is the key to long term success and to not cutting your trading career short before it has a chance to begin.