Day Trading Strategies for Beginners

Yes, you will be awarded with a certification from QuantInsti after successfully completing the online learning units.

No, there are no live or classroom sessions in the course. You can ask your queries on community and get responses from fellow learners and faculty members.

Yes, you can ask your queries related to the course on the community: https://quantra.quantinsti.com/community

Fast-speed internet connection and a browser application are required for this course. For best experience, use Chrome.

There is no admission criterion. You are recommended to go through the prerequisites section and be aware of skill sets gained and required to learn most from the course.

We respect your time, and hence, we offer concise but effective short-term courses created under professional guidance. We try to offer the most value within the shortest time. There are a few courses on Quantra which are free of cost. Please check the price of the course before enrolling in it. Once a purchase is made, we offer complete course content. For paid courses, we follow a 'no refund' policy.

Some of the course material is downloadable such as Python notebooks with strategy codes. We also guide you how to use these codes on your own system to practice further.

We focus on teaching these quantitative and machine learning techniques and how learners can use them for developing their own strategies. You may or may not be able to directly use them in your own system. Please do note that we are not advising or offering any trading/investment services. The strategies are used for learning & understanding purposes and we don't take any responsibility for the performance or any profit or losses that using these techniques results in.

Quantra environment is a zero-installation solution to get beginners to start off with coding in Python. While learning you won't have to download or install anything! However, if you wish to later implement the learning on your system, you can definitely do that. All the notebooks in the Quantra portal are available for download at the end of each course and they can be run in the local system just the same as they run in the portal. The user can modify/tweak/rework all such code files as per his need. We encourage you to implement different concepts learnt from different learning tracks into your trading strategy to make it more suited to the real-world scenario.

No. We provide you guidance on how to create strategy using different techniques and indicators, but no strategy is plug and play. A lot of effort is required to backtest any strategy, after which we fine-tune the strategy parameters and see the performance on paper trading before we finally implement the live execution of trades.

You can learn with or without coding knowledge. If you would like to do the analysis on excel, we would suggest you to start with course on Statistical Arbitrage in Trading. You can create and test your trading strategies using excel.

Alternatively, you can do the course on Python for Trading which will help you gain knowledge in all these fields: Python, Analysis and Financial markets.

Lifetime access means that once you enroll in the course, you will have unlimited access to all course materials, including videos, resources, readings, and other learning materials for as long as the course remains available online. There are no time limits or expiration dates on your access, allowing you to learn at your own pace and revisit the content whenever you need it, even after you've completed the course. It's important to note that "lifetime" refers to the lifetime of the course itself—if the platform or course is discontinued for any reason, we will inform you in advance. This will allow you enough time to download or access any course materials you need for future use.

Here are a few steps which you can consider when you start day trading.

1) Understand the difference between day trading and investing. In day trading you are thinking of the short term. You will close all your positions before the end of the day. Investing is like “buy and hold”, you will hold your positions for months to years.
2) Study the strategy which you are going to apply in the markets. This includes understanding the logic of the strategy, performing historical analysis and backtesting, optimisation and then paper trading the strategy to know its success rate in today’s environment.
3) Create a list of potential stocks which satisfy your strategy’s criteria.
4) Set the entry and exit targets and only then should you enter the trade. This helps you to keep your discipline irrespective of the market’s movement.
5) Divide your portfolio according to your risk profile and make sure you adhere to it.
6) Make sure that all your positions are closed before the end of the day.

You should note that this list is not comprehensive but a general framework.

Depending on the strategies, you would shortlist certain stocks for day trading, but you can also build a stock universe based on the following criteria:
Average dollar value traded - Quite simply, this tells us the volume of shares traded in a day in dollar value. Usually, investors prefer stocks with high volume as it means you can enter and exit the trade in a short amount of time
Volatility - The higher the volatility, the greater would be your potential wins. However, another way to look at it is in the case of a breakout strategy, you would check if there is narrow volatility implying that the stock price could suddenly shoot away from the current price ranges
Penny stocks - These are highly volatile stocks as well as unpredictable and thus difficult to time

You can also pick stocks based on your preference in the form of sectors, markets or both.

Some day trading strategies are:

Momentum trading strategy
There are three types of momentum trading strategies;, gap up, gap down, and Post-earnings Announcement drift.
In gap up and gap down trading strategies, we compare the closing price of the previous day and the opening price of the current day to anticipate the direction of the stock price and buy or sell accordingly.
In Post- earnings Announcement drift, we check the direction of the stock after the company has reported its earnings and then go long or short on the trade.

Scalping trading strategy
In this strategy, we enter and exit the trade within a short time. The logic is that we enter the market in the direction of the trade and exit it before any event or information has its effect on the stock price. In this strategy, small wins are aggregated together to create a decent return.

The ticking strategy
This can be called a variation of the scalping strategy but the time frame of the entry and exit is less than a second. In this high-frequency strategy, we compare the tick data in the order book and take our positions accordingly.