daytrading may 24 afternoon, page-16

Hi Moffy, always happy to discuss the nuts and bolts of trading. My main criteria when looking for intraday trades are liquidity, leverage and trading range, which immediately rules out most of the market. I maintain a watchlist of 100+ regulars, mostly mid-caps and a few specs with good liquidity and range. They're my bread and butter and I use price alerts to try to capture shares at extremes where there is a good chance of a rebound, ideally from a support level. I also keep an eye on a list of the day's big movers in both directions for oversolds or possible momentum plays. (I'm much stronger on the former than the latter.)

Whatever your approach to the market, it helps to know the shares you intend to trade so that you recognise opportunity when it arises.

The key to longevity in trading imo is to find something in the market that chimes with your natural instincts and strengths and build your trading method around it. For some traders it's fundamentally undervalued stocks, for others momentum trades, nearology plays, particular sectors... It doesn't really matter, so long as it plays to your strengths and gives you enough confidence to pull the trigger when your set-up conditions are met. For me, that's mainly shares hitting price extremes on pullback, so I concentrate on those, setting price alerts each morning before the market opens. With that and pulling together the pre-market wrap I probably work harder pre-market than during trading hours!