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

My journey into day trading actually took place over several years. In 2010, I began to watch the stock market (such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average) on a daily basis just for fun and was intrigued by the patterns the intraday charts would form. Some days it would pop up and then maintain a somewhat constant level. Other days it would do the opposite. Or on many days it might move in a kind of wave pattern. It was the repeatability of these patterns that interested me. It seemed like some days looked just like other days and I wondered if there was a way to profit off this repetition. In 2014, I began a three-year period of consuming every day trading book that I could find, but I never traded a single stock. I was still too timid to put actual money on the line. However, in 2017 I opened my first brokerage account and tried my hand at swing trading (i.e., trading stocks over the course of days). I only traded stocks that were trending up in a “wave” pattern and I would enter as they bounced off their 20-day moving average. The results were on the profitable side, but it was a bullish year, so maybe it was a biased experiment. But, I was exposed to two very important lessons, lessons I would have to relearn as a day trader: