Day trading? Perhaps...

I had the day to myself yesterday, so I decided to go to Barnes & Noble to see if I couldn't find something interesting to read. I found a few trading magazines, including Futures, Technical Analysis of Stocks & Commodities, and Active Trader. Some of the articles were about trading strategies, and they refered to the TradeStation platform and its EasyLanguage. I was intrigued. Apparently, one can set up one's own program trading system, and for something on the order of only $100 per month. Since my day job is being a computer programmer, this seemed like something I should have checked out a long time ago! So, last night I spent a few hours on tradestation.com, looking at all their brochure-ware and some tutorials. It seems really awesome. You can set up rules to alert you or to actually enter orders, and you can back-test the rules using their intraday historical database of stocks, options, futures, and forex prices.

Of course, when something seems too good to be true, it usually is. I'm going to open an account and let you all know how I do.

Also, at the Goodwill yesterday I picked up a cheap copy of "The Compleat Day Trader" by Jake Bernstein. Even though the book is from 1995, it references TradeStation! So they've been around a long, long time. That says something about them, I think. The book has tons of simple strategies for the beginning day trader, and also some more advanced stuff that the author himself says needs more research. I think I've discovered a new toy.