What day trading is — and is not
Day trading means opening and closing positions within a short horizon, capturing intraday moves rather than long-term appreciation. It is not a way to get rich quickly; it is a probabilistic job where a small statistical edge, applied consistently across hundreds of trades with strict risk control, produces income. Most people who fail do so because they have an opinion instead of a system.
Market structure in one lesson
Price moves in swings. An uptrend is a sequence of higher highs and higher lows; a downtrend is lower highs and lower lows; anything else is a range. Ninety percent of intraday decisions come down to identifying which of these three states you are in, and trading with it rather than against it.
Support and resistance are simply zones where previous swings turned. They are areas, not lines, and they matter most when confirmed by volume and by reaction, not by how neatly you drew them.
Orders, spreads and slippage
A market order fills immediately at whatever price is available; a limit order fills only at your price or better. Use limit orders to enter, market orders to escape. The spread and the slippage you accept are real costs that compound: a trader who scalps ten times a day pays the spread ten times.
Sessions and liquidity
Crypto trades non-stop, but liquidity is not uniform. Volatility clusters around the Asian open, the London open, the New York open and major macro releases. Weekends are thin, which exaggerates moves and traps late entries. Trading the same one or two windows every day builds pattern recognition faster than trading randomly around the clock.
Write the plan before the trade
Every trade needs five decisions made in advance: instrument, entry trigger, stop-loss level, target, and position size derived from that stop. If you cannot state all five out loud, you do not have a trade, you have an urge.
- Which markets do I trade, and at what hours?
- What is my exact entry trigger?
- Where is my invalidation, and what does it cost me?
- What is my target, and is the reward at least twice the risk?
- What is my maximum daily loss before I stop for the day?