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The charting function of a good trading tool allows you to
make informed buy / sell decisions. It should permit you to pull up an
unlimited number of charts, apply your own custom studies to them and
build individual charts into your trading layouts. It should also
support both intraday (tick and interval) and historical charts and
include up to 10 days of time and sales data, so you can monitor
detailed trading patterns over multiple days.
Find out as much as you can about popular technical studies, including
Moving Averages, Bollinger Bands, MACD, RSI, stochastics, momentum and
more. A trading tool with a built-in Help system that provides basic
explanations of technical studies can help you to know which ones to
apply to your charts and also give you basic information on how you
can interpret these indicators.
One type of study is called a Symbol Overlay. This is a very powerful
study because it helps you to evaluate a stock's performance versus
another stock in its industry or against the performance of a market
index.
For example, you can customize your Chart Window to view an individual
security's performance versus the DOW or the $COMPQ by setting up a
symbol overlay on your chart. You might set up one chart to display
IBM's performance versus the DOW and another chart to display CSCO's
recent performance versus the $SPX.
Determining that a particular issue has been consistently outperforming
both other issues in its industry, and a broad market indicator, would
be one method you might use to decide to purchase that stock.
Conversely, if you have not been happy with the performance of one of
the stocks in your portfolio, you might check its performance against
its related market index, and other issues in its industry, to make a
decision on whether to hold or sell the issue.
Customizable charting is a good, first step in the direction of
successful trading and one you'll want to see featured in the trading
tool you choose.
Some people advocate "paper trading" as a learning tool. Paper trading
is useful for testing your method, but it is of no value in learning
how to trade. Why? If you buy a computer baseball game and become a
hitting expert with the joystick while sitting quietly alone on the
floor of your living room, you may conclude that you are one talented
baseball player.
Your Trading Chair
The most important piece of equipment in your at-home trading office,
or, for that matter, any office, is the workstation chair. As a
trader, you will sit in your chair for 8 – 12 hours per day trading
and researching markets with your computer. The chair gives your body
the total support it needs to carry you through the day. It is
responsible for your posture. If your posture is good, you will feel
better and perform better trading the markets.
Don't go out and buy an office chair because of its visual allure. You
don't want an overstuffed, plush, executive office chair. It might
initially feel good, but this is meaningless. The long-term effects of
the chair on your body are what are important. Sitting on a poor chair
will eventually give you backaches and pain and result in medical
bills.
A good chair supports the main parts of your body. That includes your
back, bottom, limbs, neck, spine and head. The chair must be the right
size for your individual physique. A good manufacturer will offer you
a choice of several sizes to best fit your body height and weight.
Consider all the sizes and shapes of men and women at work around the
world today. How could one chair designed for an "average" user fit
all? Yet, most office chair manufacturers want you to believe that it
will.
The workstation chair must also have the necessary adjustment
features, so you can tweak it to fit your individual body. You need to
be able to adjust the seat height, back height, forward-and-back
tilting, arm-and-wrist height and lumbar support. All these affect
your body comfort. The more adjustment features a chair has, the more
likely it will be able to properly support your body.
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