Pros and Cons of Forex Day Trading

Pros and Cons of Forex Day Trading

Written by: PaxForex analytics dept - Monday, 28 January 2019 0 comments

Intraday trading has been one of the most popular trading activities for quite a long time. Daily trading signals that your forex daily strategy can provide you with is a key step towards your trading success. However, not all day trading techniques and systems are the same. Day trading is the active buying and selling of financial instruments within short-term, intraday time frames. In contrast to more traditional forms of capital investment, day trading aims to achieve profitability through frequently entering and exiting a market.

Day trading is very time intensive. It requires tight, active trading on small timeframes such as 15 minutes, 5 minutes or even 1 minute, and can be very stressful, difficult and challenging – and potentially very rewarding. It requires a tight focus, at least periodically throughout the trading session. It requires at least some degree of focus for the duration of the entire trading session. Day traders might use any of a wide variety of trading strategies, but what all day traders will typically have in common is seeking a series of relatively small winning trades, with gains ranging from just a few pips to at most perhaps a 1.5% movement in price as a best-case winning trade scenario.

The intra-day trading requires a very strong mind and a confident personality. It requires discipline, proper money management, adequate risk/reward, and a profitable system. Day trading allows investors to bank a smaller profit every day against risking smaller trading volume. Day traders make quick and faster money as they don’t have to wait long durations for their profits. Psychologically, closing profits (or losses) daily makes you feel relaxed as you do not have to worry about what’s going on in the market after you have left your desk. Because most positions are closed out at the end of the day, you can take advantage of every new event happening in the market by taking reverse positions. “Buy the low, sell the high”

Taking multiple positions a day means paying the spread multiple times a day which eats into your profits. But I think it does not make a big difference unless you are making losses. Making money faster comes with the risk of losing money faster. You might fall into the trap of psychological biases such as becoming overconfident after a couple of good trades or losing confidence (missing trades) after a few losses. If you aren’t a full-time trader, then day trading is not something you should do. It is time-consuming and requires you to stay in the market for every potential short-term trade.

Basically, making money day trading depends entirely on the quality of a trader’s trading plan, how well it is implemented in practice and the trader’s discipline in adhering to their own rules. Day trading becomes even more challenging when a trader comes into the market each morning unprepared. In any case, regardless of the strategy employed, aspiring day traders need to be aware of the pitfalls involved in day trading which makes it extremely difficult to gain and keep a positive edge in the long run.