Day trading can be a very dangerous form of financial speculation, but it is going on from PC all over the United States and the world. The idea is to sell a futures contract to buy a currency, or a commodity, and then buy it back, even at a later date, at a lower price. Unlike position traders, who can hold onto a stock, bond or commodities position for a long time, day traders are the scavengers of the system. They have no interest or loyalty to any currency, commodity or stock in a company. They are simply trying to, as Adam Smith, granddaddy of the British System said, to “buy cheap, and sell dear”.

There is not just the buying and selling of stocks and bonds, but also trading in derivatives and futures. Derivatives values are determined by other indexes or numbers, such as interest rates and currency levels. If you are making a futures bet that a stock will go up, or to have an option to buy a stock at a certain level.

There are many courses on the market, some in person, and some through the Internet in written form, or audio or video. Basically, what one learns is a trading system. This system can involve commodities such as gold, silver or oil, or on the Forex (foreign exchange) market, the value of a currency. Since, the person plans on day trading, it makes little difference which one of these objects are chosen to trade, except that they are all values of high volatility where one can make a profit (or loss) quickly. If you do a Google search on these topics, you will see many alternatives. Some systems involve consulting news and financial reports at a certain time of day, and using this to make decisions what futures to buy in the morning and the sell in the afternoon.

Other systems can be more esoteric. A popular system uses the variations of currency values over different time periods, some of which can be a short as 5 or 10 minutes. The curve produced by these currency value fluctuations, say of the US Dollar/British Pound pair are then plotted out on a graph and compared to the Fibonacci number series, the golden mean relations, or other ideal numeric values, and this is used to estimate the right time to buy and sell currencies. Are you willing to risk your fortunes on such schemes? Some say it is a winning proposition if you master “the system”.