08/29/2024
Let's see if I can get to where this all started a few months ago without writing a book........ I may have to actually do that to fit all the info in it. So about a year ago I tried a day trading system I came up with that did ok, but it was too hard to keep up with it all, afterall I do work a job too..... Back then the trading rules were different and it took a stock T+2 days to settle. If you don't know what that means is in short, its when you sell it takes two days for all the behind the scenes stuff to happen, paperwork, tansfer of owenership etc etc. basically for the funds to settle and be available as cash. So, two thing there. First if you buy with settled funds, think cash, you can sell at anytime after, it could be 1 minute later it could be 3 years. This is what you want to use when you are trading in such volitile stocks subject to huge gains and dumps at anytime. Now if I sold a stock that day, I could still buy something immediately with the unsettled funds, but would then have to wait until the third day to sell the new stock. Think of it like, even though I just sold, the trade papwerwork behind the scenes has to catch up, so even though I bought something new, I couldnt just keep buy and selling, that would end up in a huge paperwork/money transfers nightmare plus a good faith trade violation which eventually gets your account locked. Hope that makes sense.
So back to last year in order for me to trade dailey with settled funds, I had three pots of money. The today money, tomorrow and the next day pots. I could buy and sell today and then that money would come up avilable the third day from now. I though that sounded good at first. Then next problematic thing was I was doing 3-5 stocks per day. So now you can see how this gets very complicated, first of all finding 3-5 stocks each day and selling, then keeping track of what day what money was If I ended up holding over night etc etc. I didn't lose money doing it this way but I wasn't gaining more than if I just had it in a long term fun either, say something like SPY, BRKB, VOO, QQQ etc.
Those I just listed are all 10.5% ish over the last 30 years, more around 16-30% the last year or so. So if I couldn't beat them why put all that work into it? With working at the same time the market is open very difficult to do. I guess my thought was if I did 3-5 stocks per day if might be better if one loses, hopefuly the other two gain type of deal.
So back in June I got to thinking, they had just changed the rules the month before I believe to where you didn't have to wait for T+2 anymore for funds to settle. It's now T+1, so fund settle over night, what I sell today, those funds will be fully settled for the morning and I can basically reload and go again withou having to wait to settle before selling because i already was (cash). So thats where I got to thinking, new system, one trade per day. My though was that I should be able to win a very high percentage of the time if it's just one stock per day. I devised a whole points system and targets that I was aiming for, but that part is going to take maybe more paragraphs than this to explain. So I'm going to leave it at this for today.
Quick review, last year I was trying to do this 3-5 trades per day and had to wait three days to use the money again, but rules have changed to 1 day, and now I going after 1 winning trade perday.
More to follow..............
I must also say, this is a very high risk game. Anything I day trade is not something I would recommend anyone just go out and buy. Reason being the gains often happen for a very short amount of time and then die out, sometimes they can drop 30-50% after sale. So please don't think this is a list of stock to buy for long term. This is a system to use to hopefully find daily gains on your own. I will also post a list of stocks that I do buy for longer periods of time, but my long periods of time are only considered month to month. I'm not sure what the goal for return is on them yet, but for August that list its looking like I'll end somewhere around 30% for a slighlty more than 1 month return. I started that portion of the program on 25 July.
