The Trader’s Summer Reading Series: Episode 3— How To Day Trade For a Living
An extremely practical and hands-on guide on how to begin your stock day trading career.
Option Screener and The Wheel Screener are trader-friendly option screeners that analyze, classify, and categorize all options available on the market on a given day. The team is always more than happy to share their technical insights, market opinions, and methodologies here on Medium. This article continues our summer reading series, where founder Chris will be reading trading and market books all throughout the summer. We hope you’ll join us, and we hope you enjoy the article!
This Week’s Book: How to Day Trade for a Living
How to Day Trade for a Living was published by Andrew Aziz in 2015, and with much praise to the author, was revised post-2020 pandemic crash to include some trades and charts from the pandemic crash and recovery. That means everything discussed in the book is still very true and still applicable to today’s 2023 market (and likely for decades to come).
Book Takeaways
This book is a fantastic hands-on guide. It truly covers everything a beginner would need to start their day trading career — showing you step by step how to get started day trading in the stock market, including possible brokers, beginner trading strategies, and even the hot-key combinations that the author uses to open and close his trades!
The book also includes Andrew’s “10 Rules of Day Trading” and a rich glossary- it’s really a book I wish I’d read first thing when I started dabbling in trading nearly 7 years ago — not following the random advice of bag holders on r/wallstreetbets!
It is opinionated, but some hard rules and good guidelines are exactly what I would want as a beginner — your mileage may vary, and like many traders, day trading stocks may end up NOT being your thing — maybe you will end up finding futures trading more to your liking, or something longer term like swing trading. Regardless, in addition to the strategy, rules, and guidelines, this book provides the psychological side of trading from yet another great trader and is valuable nonetheless.
Our Rating
Now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for, our Official Wheel Screener Book Rating™! We’ve decided to rate How To Day Trade For a Living a full 5/5 star rating:
⭐⭐️️️️️️️️⭐️⭐️⭐️
If you are a beginner looking to get into day trading in stocks, this is a must-read!
The Caveat with Day Trading Stocks
The one issue with stock day trading is that you have to abide by the pattern day trading (PDT) rule. The exception is that you can convert to a cash account, but this limits the total number (and potentially size) of your trades. With a cash account, your buying power throughout the day will decrease as you make trades, and when it's used up, it’s used up. You’ll then have to wait. This can be both a blessing and a curse, but I think for beginners it’s a blessing since it limits the total number of trades and the size you can trade with — for beginners, this means preventing tilt trades, and also making it very hard to completely blow your account.
Thanks & Stay Tuned!
Tune in to the next episode to find out what book we’ll review next!
Until next time,
-Chris & The Wheel Screener Team
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