Fucking a lets boogie.

- Set up a TD Ameritrade account & Download ThinkorSwim. Trading a 'cash' account means you can only lose what you have, 'margin' means they extend you a line of credit 4x your cash balance. This can get tricky but its also very powerful.
- Search youtube (seriously) for 'swing trading' videos. Ziptrader Charlie has some fucking good ones. Honestly if I had to pick one furu for you to hollar at its him and believe me there are a lot and most are trasssssh. Ziptrader Charlie is _not_ trash and absolutely 100% drops knowledge.
- Consider using the 'paper trade' function in ToS so you can trade fake money while you get the hang of using indicators to enter/exit swing trades. MACD and RSI are two extremely important, powerful indicators. Again Charlie has excellent videos on how to use this stuff.

General mile high shit;

Dont try to holistically analyze stock value, least of all to anticipate movement. No ones really been able to do that since 2009. If the market wants to go up, bet with it. Same if its going down.

Dont play hunches eg 'I bet its going to reverse, Ill enter the trade now'. Miss me with that shit. Wait for confirmation (via movement backed up by indicators), and take a position accordingly.

Always have an exit plan. Know when to get out of a trade if it goes poorly, and have an idea where you want to exit the trade towards what you feel will be the top. No one ever enters a trade at the exact low or exits at the exact high. FOMO is so fucking real in this, you have go be able to walk away from it.

/r/wallstreetbets is a literal hive of retards but also has some insanely good data floating around in it. I dont know why. But its worth fucking with, especially if you want to get into options.

Blowing up your account is part of the process, dont get frustrated. Exactly zero profitable traders havent blown up their accounts multiple times.

If you want to get into AI backed predictive models, google Jim Simons. Trust me. Watch some youtube vids about him.

Avoid penny stocks. A lot of people love them, Charlie included, I urge you not to swallow that poison.

I'm sure I'll think of more as time goes on but this is a reasonably good opening salvo of very expensive lessons I've learned.

Webull is also an interesting possibility for you.. they have extended trading hours as it happens which can come in REALLY handy because a lot of crazy shit happens after hours, and I doubt youre going to want to be at 6:00AM to early bird the morning movement, so Webull might be perfect for you. Get a ToS account anyway tho because its a profoundly strong tool for analytics.

alright cool cool cool

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F3mdBtygzQ

this is a really, really good video and it had a big impact on me.

- this guys energy is fire.

- it covers a ton of ground superficially, so i had to do a lot of research to understand the principles underpinning a lot of his theory.

- this whole video fucks honestly.

the general consensus btw is that swing trading (multi day transactions) is more profitable than scalping by a huge margin, but with my ADHD and general video game disposition towards all this, scalping is my comfort zone.

oh two things you need to know.

1) there is something called 'settlement'. when trading stocks, settlement is T+3 i think, or transaction plus 3 days before you can re-use the funds you invested. basically thats how long it takes for the broker to process your transaction. options is T+1, so you get them the next morning.

2) there is something called the Pattern Day Trade rule (PDT). on cash accounts this doesnt exist, but on margin accounts you can only enter/exit a trade during the same trading session 3 times in a given week. so if you enter a trade at 9:31am and close it at 3:59pm, it counts as one day trade. if you hold it until the next morning however, it doesnt count as a PDT strike. this can be a real powerful edge towards swing trades but holding positions overnight can become nightmare fuel fast. stocks often have YUGE swings at night so you can go to bed up 4% and wake up down 11%, that sort of shit. TSLA was notorious for this.

but if you look at something like AAL.. when the market was recovering recently, it was putting together multiple days where every day it was gaining 7%-10% in value. so if you stacked 1k on it on a monday and it averaged 8.5% growth for 3 days, you would bank $277 profit. but thats an outlier situation and you wont see it often honestly.

and for the love of christ if youre shorting stock on margin, only stick like 20% of your roll on the line because people felt themselves relentlessly on bad decisions like shorting what they thought was the top and suddenly the stock soars 40% and they are Fucking Broke before the dust settles.

Well I went with a cash account for now, so I won't be doing anything on margin for the time being. I assume I can change that later? I also opted out of real time quotes because it seemed like it came with more hoops to jump through.

I'll check out the scalping vid, but it seems that swing-trading is more likely in my comfort zone. I have a lot of read up on, of course, so who knows.

oh you need real time quotes, its absolutely essential.

for swing trading stuff, ziptrader charlie is a source of truth.

Wow, Sonatine coming hard with some great advice. I am impressed.

I was going to go with "buy a good bong and short the dow"

again per the ToS absolutely do not construe this as actual adult investment advice, but...:






two things to focus on in this image.

1) that blue line is called the 180 day SMA or SimpleMovingAverage. AMD has a pretty established pattern; it dips below it then about 5-15 days later it rises above it.

2) if you look at the RSI graph at the bottom you can see that _generally_ it has a habit of vacillating between oversold and overbought.

lets focus on the last swing:







we started out at around $49.50 and then slutted around $51.50 - $53, then spiked to $59.

so yeah if you had entered in on the low and exited on the high you would have binked about +20%.

obviously hindsight is 20/20 but if you look at the top image, you can make a reasonable assumption that we are approaching a bottom for this cycle.

the trick is to watch it like a hawk now. in that video i sent you, iirc, confirmation is discussed. id look for MACD crossover and a push above the 9 day SMA, and then enter the trade, with the expectation to start looking for the exits once MACD crosses over on a high.

and obviously the x-factor is that an anomalous event, such as unemployment/covid/trump being trump/china trade deal crashing spooks the market and it plunges again. in which case you're blued screwed and tattooed like the rest of us.

which kinda ties back into what i said earlier; these arent 'normal' times, this isnt a 'normal' market. everything is batshit, was batshit, and is going to be even more batshit. but that door swings both ways, so yeah you might end up tapping out down 5 or 10% but you also might catch a case ace and suddenly AMD moons because they signed some weird contract with Azure or something, you get the idea.

also if the nomenclature is confusing, i urge you to just type shit into the youtube search box and hit enter. the amount of good info out there is astounding and youll learn 5 other things every time you chase a concept down.

This is pretty much how I've learned every skill I have.

Yesterday I did watch the swing trade video you posted in the other thread, so I follow you pretty well in this example. There is of course some nuance and terminology that I'll need to dive in and familiarize myself with. But I can already map out some ideas for writing a script that parses a bunch raw market data and searches for stocks that have established patterns like this. Or if many (all?) stocks behave this way, then weeding out ones that have these patterns within parameters that work better for me. It honestly doesn't even sound too hard to have it identify entry and exit points for me based on crossing the SMA or whatever threshold.

I'm sure smarter people than me have done stuff like that, or well beyond, but it's a start. For the time being I'm more in this for the learning experience than for any expectation of solving this game lol

i felt almost embarrassed even writing it because this is exactly how i and all my compatriots got where we are and i had no doubt you were among that tribe.

one of the great 'ah hah' moments for me was the realization that the whole ass game is about moving the scales in your favor a fraction of a fraction of a degree at a time. the game is extremely solvable but not everyone finds the solution palatable. eventually one gets to the point where the only real thing blocking advancement is ones own demons, so to speak. impulsivity, impatience, bias, these are the boss fights. accumulating data is just leveling up your gear.

this mother fucker right here has a lot to say about indicators btw:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmffSjdZbWQ

that video blew my dick off and fucked it back on.

also heres something important to consider as you dive into the bespoke tool game; thinkorswim has both an extensive built in scripting language and i believe an API as well. ive taken a few swipes at getting it to do things like txt me on crossovers and it hasnt worked out yet but i havent given up the fight by any means.

anyway AMD dropped again today but it may have started its reversal. we see SPY bink 2 negative nights far more than we see it bink 3, so we may be entering a growth period.

cool cool I will for sure holler at that API when the time comes. I'm sure there are all kinds of ways to import live market data into a python script.

Getting alerted to crossovers should be a breeze, so long as that's a condition that can be expressed mathematically. Which it looks like it is. I wrote a Discord bot last year that monitored events in a 24/7 multiplayer game and would drop a message in my server whenever important stuff happened.

Seems like this would be most useful for scalping, but certainly nice to have for swing trading as well