How to Day Trade for a Living: Tools, Tactics, Money Management, Discipline and Trading Psychology

I keep my charts relatively clean with a minimal number of indicators displayed. In day trading, you need to process information quickly and you need to make decisions very, very quickly. Therefore, I cannot keep track of too many indicators. Here is what I have on my charts:

All of the above indicators are automatically being calculated and plotted by my DAS Trader Pro platform. I do not find, calculate or plot these manually. I’ll explain these terms later on in this book.

For daily levels of support or resistance, my platform does not automatically find and plot them. These levels have to be identified manually by traders. I usually find and plot these levels during my pre-market screening for Stocks in Play on my watchlist or during the day when a new stock hits my scanners. I don’t trade without knowing nearby significant intraday levels of support or resistance .

I keep the color of all of my moving average indicators in gray except VWAP which is colored in blue. VWAP is the most important day trading indicator and needs to be easily and quickly distinguished from other moving averages. I don’t want to have a lot of colors on my charts and so I maintain a white background with mostly red and black coloring. Heavily colored charts are confusing and over the long term irritate your eyes and limit your vision. I avoid dark background colors on my charts because processing dark colors for any length of time makes my eyes feel achy and weak. Figure 5.2 below is a screenshot of the type of chart I use with my indicators marked on it.