Successful traders must manage time better than investors. Executing short-term positions requires far more skill than just buying a stock and holding it. But trading has a more attractive time/cash profile than investing. In other words, you can make a lot more money quickly. But you can lose it even faster without thoughtful preparation.

Short-termers exploit individual quirks of market behavior and take fast, high probability profits. And you don't need a lot of different methods. Some futures traders earn a good living just selling the same 5-min ledge formation over and over again. While not as crowd pleasing as chasing EBAY or SEEK, these well timed entries produce extremely high percentages of profitable trades.

Focus on optimizing entry and exit over all other considerations. Fully understand the time character of each part of the market day. For example, never buy weakness in the last hour if price is near the bottom of its daily range. Time of day sentiment favors continued declines for issues near their lows at this time.

Remember this golden rule of trading: over time, excellent entries on mediocre trades make more money than bad entries on good ones. Consider trading single direct moves rather than holding through inevitable pullbacks. Increase position size or improve the time/cash profile to risk more money. Or only scale in with part of a position while waiting for the next big price move.

Cross verification must be part of your trading analysis. When identical price hot spots appear in different forms of evaluation, odds increase that position will succeed. An assumption exists that each new verification (convergence at a specific price zone) raises the positive to negative feedback ratio. At rare times, Fibonacci retracements, moving averages and trendlines all work together in perfect unison. When they do, jump on board quickly.