General Discussion AGY, page-2258

It's up to you. Obviously if you go too low you're going to be wasting your time (unless you're just doing it for fun) and if you go low enough your brokerage might even be a significant proportion of the profit/loss per pip, even more than a pip, meaning you could need one or more just to cover it, so as a minimum you probably want each pip to be significantly more than double your brokerage fee, so I suppose if you have a typical trading account with one of the big four you would be paying $19.95 per trade, to buy and sell is $40, so I'd figure at the very least you'd want about $100 per pip, which at the prices of the week just gone would be about 25,000 shares (but preferably more). At the other end of the scale, if you go too big you'll start influencing the market - something around half a million shares or more and you'll possibly be making line wipes or at least taking out reasonable chunks of walls, which will push the price in the opposite direction to what you want. Maybe 100,000-200,000 would be a good amount, but 50,000 or so would also be fine.

Where to start? Haha, you'll have to work out your own way of deciding what you think is going to happen and whether or not you're confident enough in that prediction to put your money on the line. Some people play with fire and do T+2 trades (I'd be lying if I said I'd never done them, I actually used to do a few back when it was T+3, though I think it's probably an extremely bad idea for most people, and if you ever get hit with a trading halt you'll have a problem!). 'Shorting' your own stock (selling it with the intention of buying it back cheaper) is safer because at least you can't lose money after you sell. If you admit to doing this on the forums people will hate you and throw 100% irrational tantrums, which in itself almost makes it worth doing.

Keep in mind that most people will find short term trades play on their nerves meaning they have trouble focussing on their day, they might lose sleep if they leave it multiple days even if they do well with the trades, and the nerves make most people freak out and make bad decisions meaning they lose money as well as stress. I won't go into the strategies and psychological pitfalls here, but from what I've seen, most people who try this end up making small profits and big losses until they decide to stop. If you're asking a random stranger online how to get started pip trading, you probably don't have the right personality for pip trading, but hey, don't let me talk you out of anything. Almost the first thing I ever did on the stock market was pip trade, and because I got started in the bull run after the 2008 GFC, I did extremely well (any idiot making loads of short term trades on highly speculative stocks in a hard bull market is going to do extremely well) which is where I got my enthusiasm for trading. I had no idea what I was doing at first, at the time I was just working at a computer in an office for a company I loathed and started trading stocks on the work computer. I made a lot more money pip trading during my 9-5 than from what they paid me, but then again, it was a very easy bull market at the time.