There is so much information on the internet and much of it is not very good. System sellers will sell just about anything to make a buck. It becomes very difficult for those interested in day trading to get the right kind of training to become successful.

Let’s say you get something in the mail, or by doing a search, from Online Trading Academy. You read the material and begin to develop an interest.

The first thing most people will do is to type something like Online Trading Academy scam in their favorite search engine. Then the fun begins.

You will be directed to some that say the training is great and others will claim it is “bunk” or a waste of money. You are now totally confused.

The only way to find quality training about trading is do old fashioned research. This means calling on the phone and asking questions. The first question to ask would be “Do you trade the method you are teaching with real money?”

You will amazed at the fact that most of these “trainers” do not even trade! The way you find out is to ask them for some sort of proof.

After making a few calls you will find that many times you are often just talking to a salesperson. This is not all bad but it makes you wonder how you are going to get trained.

It is a known fact that most successful traders learned under the wing of a professional mentor. This is exactly what you will want!

Look for a training program that offers constant contact and support, at least until you know what you are doing.

If you approach your search for training the same way you would approach looking for a good college or university, you will be much better off.

Reading books about trading is generally what peaks our interest. Trying to jump right in, after reading a book, can be very costly.

This would be like trying to perform surgery after reading some books on human anatomy.

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Marsh’s company, E-mini Trading Strategies offers a  30 Day Double-Your-Money-Back-Guarantee which states The Tick Trader Method will achieve a minimum of 1 point a day.

If you are or haven been interested in day trading and the possibility of trading for a living, take the time to research this course. David Marsh is always availabe to speak with potential students, so you can ask as many questions as you like.

Visit his website and read everything especially his daily blog in which he recaps every single trading day. You will also gain insight into the type of man he is.

His emini trading strategies are not difficult to learn.Daytrading is not for everybody and you need to have the discipline to follow ALL the rules. The eminis can be traded from home or anywhere that you have a computer and high speed internet connection.

If you have an understanding of the futures market and trading, you can learn to trade this method in less than a single day.

You should have a basic understanding of charts, technical indicators, and order placement. Basically, you should have a good knowledge of the markets before taking the course.

Don’t have this knowledge? He has a great Beginners Primer.

The system’s goal is to make a one point profit each day. Earning a daily income is the goal.This is a consistent and conservative approach to earn daily income.

It trades the same exact way each and every day, and it is usually done for the day early in the morning. The rest of the day you can do as you please.

Most people work 40 or more hours at a job or business and have very little time for themselves and family. It simply does not have to be that way

It is possible to spend 30 to 90 minutes a day trading the e-mini markets to earn your living. it is a wonderful way of life.

Marsh’s training offers you this opportunity.

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Always keeping one eye on the S&P 500 futures is the first lesson a novice trader needs to learn in how to trade eminis. Many traders eventually move to the futures markets but for various reasons. One very large reason is the that index futures require very little research on the part to the trader each night since they trade the same market everyday. Stock traders must scan and research different stock charts every night to find possible trade set-ups that offer trading opportunities once the market opens the next day.

Another reason stock traders may decide to change from stocks to index futures is volatility. On any given day the market is open, futures will almost always move to one direction or another offering opportunities for profit. Volatility is the key to movements that appear on chart screens that offer potential trade set-ups and executions. Reasons vary as to why futures contract traders choose the emini market but one reason is clear, they give enormous income potentialt to traders that are disciplined and focused.

Learning how to trade eminis takes time and should not be approached until sound fundamentals are acquired on how the dynamics of the market works. New and inexperienced traders that have not taken the time to gain the fundamentals about the larger markets, including the futures market will most certainly fail and deplete their trading account quickly. One “death spike” can completely destroy a trading account. A death spike receives it’s name because of it’s formation on a chart. Usually death spikes occur when a unexpected financial news item hits the wires. In seconds, the futures market can turn and blow past stops, not stopping until the market has shaved off 30 or more points in seconds.

Being unprepared for these events can be catastrophic for the inexperienced futures traders. Trading more than one contract at a time with no experience is the main reason for these trading losses. Novice traders often exhibit impatience and want to rush the road to profits and end up losing all of their trading capital.

Money management or preservation of trading capital is one of, if not the most important rules and discipline a futures trader can learn. If there is on area that a trader should focus his energies on, it is developing a system that is mechanical in nature, either through software or mentally, and never deviate from this system during the trading day.

Developing a emini trading system that is tested against real time market data before ever trading the markets live, will increase the trader’s chances of being successful. Experienced futures day traders all use a system that has been tested and back tested and proven. A major function of the mechanical trading system is money management used to protect their trading capital.

Although their trading system may vary in design, all focus on money management, One trader may just use piviot points, another may use support and resistance, while others may use moving averages and crossovers. Trading systems are as varied as traders but all have one thing in common…money management!

When experienced traders first learned how to trade eminis, they quickly learned that using stops and exiting trades quickly once the trade goes south it the key to winning as in the emini markets. In fact, most traders will tell you, they experience more losing trades than winning trades, however, they have learned to cut the losing trades short and capitalize on winning trades.

Also, we need to address trading platforms. Charting software and brokerage accounts a re a dime a dozen…there are hundreds that cater to trading the financial markets. A broker should be chosen with two very important points to consider: One is commissions. Brokerage firms that cater to all financial market traders will more often have higher commissions than one that specializes in one market such as the emini market. Commission rates vary, but finding commission rates of $2.50 per side is not uncommon and these brokers should be sought out since commissions can eat into profits.

The 2nd is trade execution. The emini contract markets are fluid, volatile and can be lighting fast and fast executions are a necessity. Again, brokerage firms that specialize know what traders need in a trading platform and will offer the best executions for their clients.

Learning how to trade eminis takes discipline and focus, however once a system is proven, a new trader can quickly become a profitable trader.

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There are many good sites about Day Trading that offer pretty good information about training. Just type day trading training into the Google search engine.

What,exactly do you need to make trading weekly to begin to day trade for a living? How much would you need to replace what you earn from your current position?

People tend to not to quantify exactly what they need to earn in order to day trade full time.You need to know exactly what you need to make each week and plan accordingly.

Let’s look at an example and say you need to make 100,000 dollars eachyear to leave your current occupation. Let’s look at whatit would take to earn this kind of money day trading.

100,000 dollars a year is about 8,000 dollars each month, or 2,000 dollars each. We are considering you take a two week vacation,of course.

What it takes is knowing exactly what you are doing. You learn this by getting yourself trained by  a professional that is successful.

Sound like you heard this before? Is this not the case in becoming successful in any profession?

Once you learn a professional trading method, you must practice. Practice on a simulated account until you have complete confidence in your chosen trading strategy, and more importantly in yourself.

Assuming you choose to trade the S&P 500 Emini and your goal is to make just a single point each day. It would be required to execute 10 contracts on every trade. Margin requirement is around 1000 dollars per contract. If you do this you can reach your objective.

Reaching your goal is the key  to day trading success. Most importantly, you must have a sound day trading strategy, and it must be one that works effectively in the market or markets you trade.

It is a must that you master your trading system and follow your money management rules.There is no magic. Becoming a professional day trader requires dedication to your education as a trader, and commitment to developing your skills.

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There are many good sites about Day Trading that offer pretty good information about training. Just type day trading training into the Google search engine.

What,exactly do you need to make trading weekly to begin to day trade for a living? How much would you need to replace what you earn from your current position?

People tend to not to quantify exactly what they need to earn in order to day trade full time.You need to know exactly what you need to make each week and plan accordingly.

Let’s look at an example and say you need to make 100,000 dollars eachyear to leave your current occupation. Let’s look at whatit would take to earn this kind of money day trading.

100,000 dollars a year is about 8,000 dollars each month, or 2,000 dollars each. We are considering you take a two week vacation,of course.

What it takes is knowing exactly what you are doing. You learn this by getting yourself trained by  a professional that is successful.

Sound like you heard this before? Is this not the case in becoming successful in any profession?

Once you learn a professional trading method, you must practice. Practice on a simulated account until you have complete confidence in your chosen trading strategy, and more importantly in yourself.

Assuming you choose to trade the S&P 500 Emini and your goal is to make just a single point each day. It would be required to execute 10 contracts on every trade. Margin requirement is around 1000 dollars per contract. If you do this you can reach your objective.

Reaching your goal is the key  to day trading success. Most importantly, you must have a sound day trading strategy, and it must be one that works effectively in the market or markets you trade.

It is a must that you master your trading system and follow your money management rules.There is no magic. Becoming a professional day trader requires dedication to your education as a trader, and commitment to developing your skills.

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It’s actually quite simple. The futures market is just a bet on where an index will close at a future date in time. That is not any different than having the opinion "I think GE will be 3 points higher in 3 months". Think about thousands of people, or even 10s of thousands all betting on the price of GE in 3 months. Not tomorrow, 3 months from now.

This aggregate valuation call would be considered a futures market. It may be higher or lower than where GE is now, but you also have to consider the people have 3 months to be right - that is a lot of time. This time has a value - the more time you have to be right, the easier the call is. So the market puts this time value into the price of the futures, and each day that goes by a bit of it decays (goes away) as it gets closer to the 3 month time. This short 3 month time frame in this example is a fixed amount of time, it does not scroll forward or get bigger. So if the bet is a close of at least X price by july 31st, 2 weeks from now the date to be right is the same but the time left is less.

If this still seems confusing, think about this example:  Every day an analyst says “The market will fall 300 points today."  If that happens in 1 day, he gets a bonus of $40,000.00.The more time anyone has to be right can happen just by random chance, given enough time until the bet expires.The time increase you might give a person to be right would actually decay the value of the prediction being right.If the guy is given 1 month to be right, that is only worth $10,000.00.It the time to be right is 3 months, that is only worth $1000.00.00 and so forth, this is a type of time decay.

This basic concept is then carried over to the stock indexes. Traders and investors place bets based on current and anticipated information and research for what they think the value of the index wil be in the future. One key to always remember - futures and cash are equal on expiration as the futures are converted into cash value. So if the S&P 500 index is at 1400 on expiration, so will the futures contract trade to this price. Because of this, that difference can be arbitraged between the two (cash and futures) since they trade separately. Anyone can make a bet on the futures market without even touching the cash index or stocks. In just the same way, I can buy a large basket of stocks in the index without touching the futures market. This give and take causes the 2 of them to fluctuate independently.

If the futures get too high (people buying futures but not stocks), there is free money there since at expiration futures and cash are equal. So you can sell the futures, then buy the basket of stocks that make up the index and lock in free money if you hold it until expiration. There are whole other program trades that simply day trade stocks vs futures all day long based on the premium to cash being too high or too low.  By selling the futures, you have agreed in principal to sell the basket of stocks comprising the index at that futures price. If the futures are 1430 and the cash is 1400, and the time value is 20, theoreticaly the futures should be at 1420. At 1430, I can sell the futures, then buy the stocks and lock in 10 points for free. Doing it in real time is not this easy, but the basic underlying concept is.  Anyone who wants to learn to trade needs to understand how the futures market works.

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First off, you really need to treat  day trading as a profession. This means act like its a real job and your only way to make money. You need a dedicated computer to trading with at least 2 monitors. Older computers are fine for some things, but do not try to use an older computer that is underpowered for trading. I can assure you that computer will fall behind of the task. You do not want lagging data, there is nothing worse as a trader - this will cause you to lose money. Trading is super data intensive, make sure you have a computer with at least the following specs:

1. A minimum dual core chip, ideally you want a quad core chip. Each core can run a separate app, really lessens the chance that the computer will stall out. Make sure the chip has a decent amount of L2 cache. If you dont know what this is, ask a local computer nerd, they will help you.

2. A minimum of 2gb of memory, the more the better, and the faster the better. If you want more than 4gb you will have to use a 64 bit operating system. Make really sure before you do this step that whatever software you plan on using is compatible. As far as memory goes, you should be fine with 2-4gb. The faster the memory the better, but no need to really pay up for special memory.

3. a separate, discreet graphics card from AMD or Nvidia. Make sure the card can handle at least 2 monitors. You do not need a high end gaming card, you should be able to get something decent for about 100-150 bucks easy. Do not use thebuilt in graphics on the motherboard - they are really cheaply made and are underpowered. Running real time charts and quotes is very graphics intensive - there are hundreds, and sometimes thousands of things that need to be presented in real time.

You only need this on the main computer you will be trading on and doing your charting. You want 1 dedicated screen for order entry and 1 screen for charting. If you have any other computers that are older, those are totally fine for surfing the net, getting news, IM chat and other stuff. Once your trading computer is setup, you should keep it uncluttered with other applications - install those on another computer. You do not want it to crash or lock up during trading hours.

Just like a real office, you need a dedicated space that will serve as your trading center and workplace. It should be setup like you would a desk in an office - phone, light, supplies, computers etc. Remember to succeed, you really have to treat learning trading as a real business, not some kind of hobby. A hobby is fine, but you cannot expect to become an expert unless you treat it seriously. When you are concentrating on trading, do not let outside influences distract you. This means you need to really pay attention, do not chat with friends or watch tv shows and kind of "glance" at the market. If this type of behavior would not be acceptible in a normal office, it will not cut it for trading either.

Once the office is setup, it is time to get serious about how learning the in's and out's of the market. While this blog is a great source of information, you really cannot expect to learn everything for free online. Go to Amazon.or other sites like Trader's Galleria - search for the term "charts" or "stock charts". You want a beginning book and an advanced book on charting. In order to learn about trading, you have to figure out the mechanics of price movement and become and expert at charting. This will take some time, its not easy. As you get better at it through practice, it is much easier to learn new ideas and concepts because you have the background to understand them.

Expect learning charts to take about a year to get good, but in a month or 2 you can get a good start. Again, do not fall into the trap of thinking “if I throw some money at this, someone will show me secrets and shortcuts”. If you don’t have the background to understand, no amount of shortcuts will help you at all because you have no clue about how or why something might work or not work. One word of caution - do not attend any seminars until you have at least mastered basic charting - your money and time will be wasted. IF you think you know enough to tackle the advanced book, then it is probably time to attend a seminar to learn more. Again here there is no substitute for experience. You will need to watch the markets every day, even if its just for an hour or 2 (until you decide its a career move you can make).

Static charts are fine to go over when the market is closed, but you really need to watch it live as well. If your time is impacted because you have another full time job and cannot watch the market here is a secret: Get some screen capture video software (records your screen to video) and an external usb hard drive, probably 500gb will do. Set up a real time chart of the market and a few stocks on your screen before you leave for work. Set up the recording software to save to the external usb hard drive. You can set up a macro (there are free programs out there that can do this, search Google) if you are not home when the market opens. Set i to record at least an hour of video of the market open and any charts you have open. Then when you get home at night, you can play this back in real time and work on watching for chart patterns. If this does not appeal to you, some of the brokerage firms or data vendors have market replay that can replay parts of the prior day for you.

I have not touched on one last thing - charting software. There are tons of them out there. I have my own preferences, but that does not matter. You need to find what you are comfortable with. Some programs are very complicated, some are simple to use, and yet others will let you code custom indicators and trading systems. If the beginning , I would suggest everyone go with simple. What good is having 500 things you have no clue what they do or how they work?? All that does is confuse more and add things you are not ready to use. Just make sure its a fully robust charting package – meaning all charts are live, you can put tick charts AND minute based charts up (not delayed data, live data) AND its not web based. By web based, I mean it runs in a browser rather than a dedicated, loadable program. You want a separate, installed program - they are by far more stable, and faster by leaps and bounds for the most part. You do not want web based order entry (browser) for active trading, its just too slow - you need real time profit and loss and the ability to watch positions in real time. It is simply too slow and delayed to be of much use. Web based is totally fine for buy and hold, longer term investing. Winning at trading is about time, even 5 seconds delay can cost you 50c or more per share in lost profit if the market is moving fast. That cost is real and can result in a winner turning into a loser.

While this was not a tutorial on how to trade, I tried to touch on a few subjects often overlooked when people are trying to learn to trade. They overlook these because they either cost money (charting software, real time data, computers) or they think they take too much time so lets find a way to skip this or that part.

Some costs of doing business are fixed costs and must be bourne in order to be in business. If you are a trader, data costs and charting package costs are one of many. Often you can get them minimized or waived if you are active, but for probably the first year expect to pay for them as you are learning.

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The next lesson in my course on how to trade stocks which covers stock trade execution on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).

Duration : 0:4:15

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The next lesson in our course on the basics of stock trading which covers how to place a stop and stop/limit order in the ThinkorSwim platform.

Duration : 0:5:52

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The second of two lessons on trading stocks on margin which covers the basic rules surrounding trading the stock market on margin.

Duration : 0:4:56

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