Do you feel like your 9 to 5 job is sucking the life out of your precious time?

With the little free time you have during the week, I’m sure it’s nice to not have to rush out the door every morning, and also be able to relax after a long day of work. Plus, you probably don’t want to spend the two days off you have from your job just working more.

Needless to say, being a successful day trader while maintaining a 9 to 5 job is near impossible without having the right tools and proper guidance.

But don’t worry. We’re going to give you the tips and tools you need that will alleviate your worries, and help you become a profitable day trader while still carrying on your job.

The Psychological Toll of the Market

The market can be an exhausting maze to navigate when you first start out. Full of treacherous pitfalls, upsetting losses, and stressful swings in prices. Even seasoned vets in the market experience these burdens. Adding this mental weight to your plate when you’re already focused on your job can be exceptionally difficult to manage.

This is probably the biggest problem that all new day traders with 9-to-5 have to deal with—your mind can focus on one thing, but multitasking to infinity and beyond is simply not viable, and usually leads to a lot more stress than profits. However, trading while busy isn’t impossible: Imagine having a guide that knows how to traverse the vast, mentally taxing jungle of the market, leaving you with more time to focus on your full-time job and family life.

Well, that’s what we do. The Trading Analyst knows the right paths to take because we’ve faced the obstacles beginning traders face, and transmuted losses into lessons that now permeate into our successful beginning strategy. While trading on the stock market can be a hobby for some, it is a profession for us. We are constantly making adjustments to our strategy, keeping the pieces that work for us, and doing away with the ones that don’t benefit the bottom line, profits.

Rely on Stop Losses

What if you don’t even have a couple minutes in your day to check your holdings until after the market already closes? I had a job like that, and it made it impossible to day trade, until I discovered the magic of stop-loss orders.

Stop-loss orders are an exceptional tool to utilize when you don’t have time to continually watch the market. After you conduct some basic technical analysis, and you are confident in the price you want to execute your trade, you can place a stop-loss order.

This tremendously helpful tool is like having a friend watch the market constantly for you, and execute a trade at the price you want. And even more importantly, it can cut your losses dramatically if the markets suddenly turn bearish—which they tend to do from time to time.

Say that you’re a floor manager at a grocery store, and your first break of the day is after the stock market closes. You can’t pull out your phone while you’re on the clock, and you can’t sell your positions on your break because it will already be too late. This is an example of why it is crucial to use the power of stop-loss orders.

So while you’re focused on your job, stop-losses have your back. 

Simplify and Focus on Your Research

Diligent research is imperative to become a profitable trader. But when you find you find the time during the work week, do you really want to spend the majority of your two days off buried in research? Almost no one does, but this is another important aspect of trading we can help you with.

Our job is trading. We spend heaps of time conducting research, hedging risk through our intricate strategy, and technically and fundamentally analyzing every position we enter and exit.

Unfortunately, research is the most time-consuming factor in a successful trading strategy. But fortunately, we can bear the weight of researching that you would otherwise have to carry to be profitable in the market. Thorough research begins with finding opportunities in the market.

This alone can take a lot of time. ‘Hot stocks’ like Apple and Tesla are being watched hawkishly by everyone, making it difficult to enter and exit at the right times, and searching for lesser known stocks can be like finding a needle in a haystack.

Next, after you find some feasible options, you need to conduct an analysis. With day trading, as well as swing trading, technical and fundamental analysis are common types to use. This includes, for example, recognizing chart patterns and reviewing historic prices/ volumes (technical analysis), and reviewing raw data in the form of the underlying companies’ financials (fundamental analysis).

These are just some of the reasons why research and analysis are so important, yet quite time consuming. TTA can simplify this process for you by being the torchbearer, giving you a time-saving approach by relieving the time load required to research & analyze.

Don’t Run Before You Can Walk

It’s an attractive idea to make a second income through trading, right? Of course it is, but take it easy, tiger—it takes a great deal of time, and a lot of patience to get there. A mindful approach to trading is crucial if you want to be successful, especially in the beginning. The priority should be to learn, and gain experience. Knowledge imbued with experience transforms into wisdom.

Experience comes in different forms, and incurring heavy losses are great learning opportunities. But if you’re prioritizing profits, losses will easily discourage you, and you’ll miss a climacteric lesson that could save your portfolio from future losses. Focus on the here and now. Record every gain, every loss, meditate on your decisions, ask yourself why you’re making the moves you’re making. This is the key to realizing success in the future.

Create a Living Strategy

What strategy works best for you? No single trading strategy fits everyone. Your strategy should cater to your lifestyle, and how much time you’re willing to spend looking at the market per day/ week/ month. Everyone has a different set of responsibilities, and differing ways of spending their time and energy. Your strategy should cater to your specific situation.

But what is a trading strategy, how do you develop one?

Start with the idea of being a present, mindful trader, and develop a strategy based on what you find to work, and what does not work for you. Be flexible. Adapt your trading strategy to the market, as the market is always moving and you need to move with it. Let’s dive a bit deeper and look at the concept of a lean startup in creating a business to help explain this point further.

A lean startup is a mindful way of creating a business, and we can liken this to creating a trading strategy. This means that you should employ process-oriented thinking versus goal oriented thinking. Having a goal is important, but if you are only focused on that, you can be blind to what is right in front of you, and can lead you down a path of essentially gambling because you’re stubborn about reaching the goal you set.

Your strategy shouldn’t die the moment you have a successful trade. Meaning, if you developed a strategy that worked once, great! But again, you need to be flexible and move with the market, not against it. For example, if you’re bullish on a few companies and their latest earning report turns out to be underwhelming—it’s probably time to be flexible.

Amateur traders get emotionally attached to their profits and losses, and they get caught in a dangerous wake because of this—this brings both losses and takes away from your peace of mind. Seasoned, veteran traders see every trade as an opportunity to learn, and make adjustments to their strategy based on the direction of their trades.

And along the way, as your strategy develops, TTA can be on your side, meet you where you’re at, and lend you a helping hand. Any active trader can benefit from knowing, in real time, when there are major price swings in a position they are watching (or trading).

Keep a Trading Record

Do you like to journal? Or have you ever tried it? If you have, you’ve probably found how beneficial it is for self-improvement—and this is something you can keep for trading also. Maintaining a trading record is a must for anyone trying to grow as a trader, and learning how to be successful in the market. Further, it’s a great way to essentially collect data that you can use to make informed decisions in the market.

Think of your journal as a database of knowledge. Data-driven decisions only improve as more data is collected. So as you accumulate data (knowledge in the market), statistically, your trade decisions will become stronger, and closer to the mark you’re aiming for. It’s easy to be discouraged by big losses, but by recording them, along with your profitable decisions, you can create lessons from losses, and future gains, as we’ve touched on above. Think of success as success, and “failure” as learning.

Remember that while day-trading seems to be about the short game, it’s not. So don’t get too caught in the weeds, emotionally attached to your intraday profits or losses. It’s exhausting to be tethered to short term movements in your portfolio. We suggest recording your profits and losses each day, and look at your overall percent growth on a monthly basis.

Here are some examples of things that would be fruitful for you to record: the date you bought or sold a stock, the name of the stock, the trade price, how long you held on to it, the level of risk you are assuming, some notes about why you made the decision to enter the position, and why you decided to exit the position.

What is The Trading Analyst (TTA)?

TTA is a team of seasoned investors that, with years of experience, have built a profitable portfolio around our tried and true strategy. We tremendously value risk management, and because of this, our strategy incorporates a complex procedure we’ve developed that hedges risk greatly, and keeps our portfolio strong and healthy.

Through this development and experience, we have created a platform that helps guide those that are interested in learning about, and investing in the stock market. We want to provide you with tools and information that can help you become a profitable trader, even when that majority of your time is spent on your job, being with family, etc.

One powerful tool we lend, for example, is our trading alerts. These alerts are sent in real time via text. They alert you to major price swings, as well as when we execute trades so you can follow in our footsteps.

We also give subscribers access to a list of securities that we have found to be potentially profitable. Choosing stocks for your portfolio is a very time consuming process because of the time inherently built in conducting research and analysis.

In addition to some of the tools and information TTA can provide you, here are some helpful tips and suggestions to help you be successful in the market, and still maintain your 9 to 5.

But, you don’t want something that just sounds good—like everyone, you want something that works. Here is how we work: To date, we’ve helped more than 11,450 traders see success in the market. Just look at our performance from January 2018 – July 2021:

  • Starting equity (Jan 2018): $100,000
  • Equity (July 2021): $842,744.71
  • Net profit: $742,744.71
  • Winning trades: 301
  • Losing trades: 248
  • Average win: $4,526.05
  • Average loss: -$2,498.37
  • Profit factor: 1.81
  • Win rate: 54.8%

The Bottom Line

The Trading Analyst is here to help. We know how scary it can be to get started day trading, and we’re familiar with the pitfalls beginning traders often fall in. Our years of experience have given us a deep sense of familiarity with the environment of the market, and we want to help guide you through it’s maze to become a profitable day trader.

By keeping an accurate record of your trades, making stop-loss orders a habit, have a process-oriented mindset, and following in TTAs footsteps, you can ensure you’ll be a cut above the rest of beginning day traders, and execute profitable trades in no time while still maintaining your 9 to 5 job, and enjoy the precious free time you have.