Talk to any experienced day trader and they will tell you that discipline plays a key role when it comes to day trading.

The best day trading plan is useless if you don’t have the discipline to follow it. Many day traders take time to develop a good plan but when it comes to trading for real they let their emotions take over and forget about their plan. Trading without discipline is like trading without a plan!

With a lot of money on the line day trading is a stressful activity, maintaining discipline and following your plan will allow you to take control of your emotions and reduce your stress levels. Having a solid trading plan and limiting stress and emotions will make you feel more calm, relaxed and in control. You will feel more confident and even after taking a loss you can recover, stay focused and continue to trade.

Here are a few tips that can help you stick to your trading plan:

1) Keep a trading log – Write down all of your trades so you can evaluate them, you can use the logs to analyze your trades and create performance reports based on each trade.

2) Keep a trading journal – as traders we make mistakes, keeping a detailed journal will enable you to learn from your mistakes and not repeat them.

3) Establish a daily routine – Creating a daily routine checklist will help you focused on your trades and avoid making unnecessary mistakes, refer to your checklist before and during trading.

4) Avoid common pitfalls – After a few losing trades you might be tempted to change or abandon your plan, stay calm and stick to your plan, there are winning days and losing days and no plan is perfect.

Don’t compare the results of your trading strategy after only a few trades, give your strategy a chance to work and don’t give up too early.

Finally take your time when testing your strategy and don’t rush it!

At Star Alliance Capital Partners, we are looking for new traders to join our firm and begin trading equities. We would like to invite you to our free day trading webinar.

At this free webinar you will learn the basics of trading and we will show you how a professional trader is able to make money from stock market movements. To register please visit us at :

http://www.staralliancecapital.com/dimensiontrading/online-webinar.html

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It has been repeatedly advised that in order to be successful in online trading or day trading, one should have a plan and be able follow it. The trader must have the discipline to stick to the plan and be consistent.

Being consistent in online stock market trading is like  making the same decisions when it comes to reacting to several different scenarios.

Being consistent trader also means being practical when it comes to executing your trading instructions. The trader needs to keep it simple and just analyze these movements if they are worth repeating or not.

If you are not fickle with you online trading plan, you will stay disciplined and consistent with your movements. These can contribute immensely to your trading success.

To learn more about how you can be a consistent online trader we invite you to attend our free online educational workshop. Click here to register for free.

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Free Investment or  Business seminars are usually held at nice hotels hosted by different organizations that are either investing institutions or teaching institutions hired by these companies.  Some companies like brokerage firms usually have seminars to explain their services.

If you want to make extra money or want to start a new business or simply want to try something new, these online day trading  seminars could be of great value to you. Although reading books or surfing the internet may be helpful to you, we find that interacting with a group of people is a much more enjoyable way of learning. This opens a lot of possibilities; you may end up with business proposals from the people who attended the seminar or learn from their experiences. Although it is important to attend seminars whose topics coincide with your interests, you can also get new ideas by simply attending as many seminars as you can. This is not a waste of your time because at some point you will learn something new.

Some stock market trading seminars offer freebies such as cd’s or books that you can use in addition to the knowledge you acquired from the said event. Listening is a very important tool in learning. You will not learn everything you want to know by attending free seminars, but you may pick up something that may be a big help to your future endeavors. Take advantage of this free seminars. Who knows, the next one might be a life changing experience.

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Trading through round and whole numbers like .25  .50  .75  and .00 are of psychological importance to many traders.  Big money managers and old time professional traders don’t care about the pennies that scalpers and algorithms try to capture.  These people are looking for some type of move and they are always thinking ahead to the next important price level.  Of course now, the more even the number, the more powerful the psychology.  So .50 and .00 are considered more important in terms of buying and selling in the active trader’s mind.  With the bigger money not putting buys or stops at odd numbers like $52.57, you can expect prices like $52.50 or $52 getting more action resulting in refreshing sellers or buyers.  Big money likes to think in half and whole dollars when making purchases or sales.  Studying the intra-day market strength and understanding how level 2 reacts in your individual stock right before it turns coupled with focused round and whole number trading can increase your chance of making sizable trades for great profits.  Here’s a sample chart of RIMM and how it looked at every round number during some type of consolidation.

For more information about how you can join our team of traders, please

 visit us at  www.staralliancecapital.com

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It could be important to monitor news flow and past price patterns of support and resistance. This chart is your road map in planning ahead.  Keep these levels in mind as these are the most recent psychological price points of importance.

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If you read my post yesterday about not trading the open, you’d understand how my line of thinking came to develop this idea.  The reason for this method is to give you a solid visual on the first 15 min of price noise.  By boxing the first 15 min I can easily focus my eyes on where the market is coming from relative to the open.  Doing this helps you keep in mind that after the first 15- 20 min the trend will have taken shape when the box created and copied exactly to fit everyday’s chart, is broken to the up or downside.  Box trading can help you understand market direction once the move has taken shape outside of the empty box as it gets filled during the opening minutes. After this you can then put faith into the direction of the market, making your individual stock picking a little less challenging.  Of course this strategy is not fool proof and money must be managed properly admitting when the market is not acting right as it for example of Monday 5/24 .  Study chart below;

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There are many different strategies that people will study, back test and theorize in attempt to make consistent profits in the market.  But when your strategy has shown consistent price patterns during a certain month or season, year over year, then it’s unnecassary to credit yourself for finding a profitable trading system clouded with countless indicators.  What you just did was find a super performing stock or sector that has a clearly definable and high probable rate of return. Let’s take QCOM for example, in March for the last 18 out of 19 years has been an up month for the stock.  It’s no coincedence that March is significantly a positive month for Qualcomm and I would speculate it has something to do with April’s earnings date and the anticipation that it’ll be the strongest reporting month as it has been historically speaking.  Trends in seasonal like patterns exist everywhere in the market and could really increase your chances of making consistent profits regardless of market direction. But of course any help from the market would just make your trade much more favorable.

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It is always a good idea to know what an average swing on the stocks you trade. Calculation is very simple and gives you a good risk/reward ratio trades.

Study the last couple months on the stocks and write down how much a stock rallies before continuing its downtrend (from Low to a High) vise versa on an uptrend (from High to a Low) and then add them all up and average it.

You can use this number in 2 ways.

1) if you are in a trade and want to stay with the move, use a trailing stop little more then the average. (if your average swing is .35 use .40 or .45 as a trailing stop)
2) You can use it as an entry in a trending day. On an uptrend you can get long on a pullback when market gets close to your average and use a tight stop. ( if your average swing is .35 you can get long .30 pullback and risk .10 or .15. This is a high risk/reward ratio trade. You may be able to catch the next leg up.

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Squat Bar is a good indication for a market reversal in a congestion market. Almost all charting programs have volume indicator, big volume in a small range bar (Range = H-L) creates a Squat Bar. The logic behind  is very simple. If market can’t continue its trend with good volume, most likely it will reverse.

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