I am back after a gap of 6 weeks almost.
First of all, I realized that day trading cannot be done daily - at least by me. I am learning to sit on losses, which is key. The money for day trading should be thought of as a resource to make more money. Profit and loss are part of the game. I am getting to that mentality.
Second, there is money to be made before earnings announcements. Citi was widely anticipated to provide great Q2 earnings since Goldman and JPM had already done so. I brought Citi stock (5K) 5 days before earnings and it grew 20% during the days leading up to the announcement. To the surprise of many, Citi did badly and the stock was set to go down. I exited my positions before the plummet began. That is the good part.
Given I was following Citi for 4 days, I thought I 'know' this stock and can make some quick profits based on 1-2 cent trading i.e. putting in large amounts of money and wait for the stock to rise 2 cents and take all the money out. That was the bad part. I tried making a quick buck but the stock moved in the opposite direction and kept on doing that. I decided to hold on to the stock for a few days till it comes back to the same levels, which it did today. I sold off the stock fro exactly the profit that I was supposed to make in 1 minute - however, this trade took 5 days.
Overall, I am running at 27% profits in 3 months. Has been good for an iPhone, a camera and a laptop. Below is the total graph. I am using days of trading on the x-axis (before I was using actual dates of the trades) as there was a huge gap in between.
