How To Find Some Trading Ideas

For people new to trading, or even the experienced trader finding stock trading ideas is always the hardest thing. Like in most other industries, quality, not quantity is the key here. Coming up with a list of 70 possible stock trading ideas does no one any good. You cant possibly follow, or even act upon that many ideas in a dynamic environment during the day.

Usually a good start begins before the market opens. Everyone should know the economic news that has been released, or is scheduled for release during the day. This will give some guidance to the market direction (or can create some extreme volatility if the news is unexpected). This is more for an overall feel - it does not directly generate anything that is tradeable in terms of ideas. However to have a good list stock trading ideas, you need to have a feel for overall market direction.

Once this is done, use a price scanner to find stocks that are moving in the premarket, either up or down. These are usually items with news on them - but not always. Go to each of these names (the ones that stand out) and pull up a daily chart. Are the names near a clear support or resistance area? Is the chart in a defined trend, either up or down? If so, its probably good to put this name on the list as others will probably see the chart too and that will lead to more action during the day. It is probably a good idea here to not have more than 7-10 trading ideas on your list before the market opens - otherwise you cannot focus on trying to take advantage of the idea if there is an opportunity.

When the market is open, pay attention to news feeds during the day - this can be a key to sector movements if there is a decent story that comes out. Look for macro stories that will affect all stocks in a sector, rather than XYZ corp gets a 5mil order. Those might be ok for scalp trade, but you really have to be fast. For the most part, computers are much faster than people. They have computers looking for keywords in headlines to trade off of. So unless the news is really huge, this game generally will be a losing one. Anything with news that is deemed important should go on your watch list of trading ideas to monitor during the day.

While not perfect, making a list like this will give every trader, novice or expert alike a decent list of stocks to watch for potential trading setups.