Where to start

For a while now I have thought about daytrading. My father in law became a day trader several years ago by neccesity after losing his job and without any formal training he managed to successfully replace most of his income. I have always wanted to day trade but never felt comfortable trying. Either lack of time, money, courage, whatever kept me from taking that leap.

Now I am finally doing it. I am going to dedicaite the next several months ot developing my trading strategy and testing it out before I start using my hard earned dollars.

I'm going to keep this journal/blog as a way to track the development of my thinking as a make this journey. Hopefully I will be able to correrct my mistakes quicker by seeing how I came to make those decisions.

This blog is really intended for my own personal benefit, but if anyone out there wants to read it and can gain something from it, then great. On the flip side, if you have been at the day trading game longer than me, I welcome your comments.

I have spent the last several weeks reading multiple books about trading. My current plan is to keep reading and watching the market. I am still playing around with my charts (right now I am using Charles Schwab's StreetSmart) to determine what I am most comfortable with. The biggest decisions/questions I am trying to make/answer right now are

1) How do I pick the stocks I want to follow? (What factors do I look at to initially choos the stock and what indicators will I be looking at when I monitor the stock?)

2) How many stocks do I follow? (Should I start out small and just watch one? Do I need to spread it out over many industries? What should be my long term goal?)

3) How many trades per day will I be looking to make? (My father-in-law makes 3-5 trades a day, but then I also read about people making 100 trades in a day.

4) How often do I need to be right and how much do I expect to make on winning trades? (I will be starting off slow only trading in 100 share blocks and not risky very much of my capital. My primary goal is to develop a system that is profitable. Later on I can gradually increase the amount invested in order to reach my investment goals.

Capital: $100,000
Goal: $80,000 a year over trading 200 days a year = $400 / trading day