Hey, everybody, it’s Marina, the trader chick, and I am so excited that you guys are here, because today we are going to do something really big. We are going to bust the myths of day trading. Are you ready? Because this is what keeps so many people back, and we’re about to bust through it. So I am the trader chick, this is me and one of my favorite little people, and we are going to be ready now to dove into the misconceptions and myths of day trading and bust them out of the water, because this is what’s keeping so many people from actually doing great things.
Are you guys ready? Just a really quick intro of who I am. I mean, some of you don’t know who I am just yet. Like I said, I am Marina, the trader chick. I am an expat. I live in Antigua, Guatemala, and this is my family here. I’m also trilingual. And the reason why I bring this up is because one of the things that I did recognize when I started to really learn to trade is that the markets have their own language.
And also being trilingual helped me recognize that. So I am originally from the Soviet Union. I am a Soviet Union refugee. My family and I arrived to the United States when I was really young. So I do speak Russian. That is my mother tongue. But because I was raised in the United States, English is my main language, as you could hear it, and I am completely fluent in Spanish since I have now been living in Central America as an expat for over 20 years.
We first lived in Costa Rica and now in Guatemala and I learned Spanish in my later years. So for me, the process of learning a new language really, really affected how I see things. And that’s when I recognized that the markets are also speaking to us in their own language. And once we understand it, it really simplifies things. And one of the things that is really important to break through is misconceptions of it. First of all, one that we will be hitting a lot more later on.
The misconception is, before I became a day trader, I was a fitness instructor and a travel writer. You do not need to be anything other than who you are. And that’s the beauty of it, because they are treating anyone can do it. And I still have my travel site because travel for me and my family is not a luxury. It’s a necessity. So becoming a day trader was really, really important that it worked with our lifestyle because we travel for three to four months out of the year and being able to do day trading from anywhere really, really helps make that difference.
OK, so let’s begin by busting some of these myths. First of all, what in the world is day-trading, and why is it not investing? Because whenever I tell people that I’m a day trader, so many people are like, oh, I want to learn how to invest. But it’s not, it’s very different. So I want to talk about that. So we really understand the difference. First and foremost, day trading is unlike investing in a number one way is that we do not want to diversify.
When you are investing, you want to have a diversified portfolio because you are investing to different companies. It’s kind of like real estate. You’re buying different real estate properties. So investing is you’re buying different. I guess ownership of different companies, Apple, Tesla, Amazon, whatever it is, right, you’re investing in that for them to grow. Day trading, we do not want to do that because we don’t care about the growth. We want to focus on one particular instrument.
And in trading in financial markets, they are called instruments, either a certain stock, either a certain cryptocurrency, either a certain financial market like futures options, forex, and even inside those they are instruments. Right. So it’s literally like a musical, a music student. Right. They focus on one specific instrument. Right. So, for instance, if your child comes over to you and says, hey, mama, papa, I want to play a musical instrument, you’ll be like, awesome.
Which one? And they’ll be like, well, I want to learn how to play the piano, the violin, the flute, the drums. You’ll look at them. You’re like, well, you first need to focus and really master one instrument before you can move on to the next one. Right. And that’s really the exact same thing with day trading. So because we are literally in and out of positions in the same day, literally intraday, in the same date, we want to focus on one specific instrument that we really understand how it moves so that we are able to make the most of it right.
Just as a music student, we want to do the same with our instruments in the financial market. OK, so investors, they care about the companies that they are investing in. For instance, if I want to invest in Apple, I’m going to care about their new iPhones. I’m going to care about their Apple TVs and their upgrades and all of that. Right. Because I’m investing in the company to see grow over the years, day trading.
We don’t care. We do not care what it does because it’s during that day. And what we focus on are the charts and understanding how the charts move. So we’re going to be doing that. We really want to focus on what’s happening in front of us and not have a multiple different instrument that we are watching because it can get confusing. And the cool thing about trading, we don’t care if the market is going up or if the market is going down because we could optimize and monetize both movements up or down.
It’s called going long or going short, buying in the market or selling in the market. Now, like I said, we do not care either way per day traders. That’s the beauty of it. We can make money going up, or we can make money going down. And that’s where day trading really, really differs from investing. Right now, we’re going to get into the real nitty-gritty of these myths and the busting of them. First of all, the number one thing we all hear about day trading, it’s too risky.
It’s like gambling. Right? How many of you guys have heard this over and over and over again? Here’s the reality, guys. It is not risky. Why? Because the people who are telling you that have absolutely no skill, they have not even learned how to read the charts at all. They throw their money in because their arms, their friends said maybe this is a good idea, and then they think they’re going to get rich. And what happens because they don’t know what’s going on, they don’t even know if it’s a trending market going up or if it’s going down.
They just got in because somebody said so, or they just think they’re going to get rich quick, and they end up losing money. It’s kind of like jumping in the car and somehow miraculously turning it on and taking it on a highway. We all know you’re going to crash, right? We all crash because we don’t know. The technique of driving is the same thing with training. When you have a very, very solid strategy, the skill which any of us can learn, we can also completely, completely get rid of the risk.
And that is a huge thing to understand because it is not risky if you know what you are doing, and you are protecting yourself.
OK, the other big myth is you need twenty-five thousand dollars to get started. Completely untrue and totally untrue. You could start with ten bucks for this one hundred bucks future. Five hundred dollars. Even with trading stocks, which this is mainly that rule is for equities that you need to have twenty-five thousand dollars.
The main reason that is said is so that you could get a margin account. We will talk about margin accounts and a little bit because those are the biggest scams that are out there through your brokers. So you do not need to have a margin account to be able to trade daily. You can start with as little as a hundred dollars depending on the market, instrument you are going for twenty five thousand dollars, if not true. Not true, OK.
The other thing, they have to be a math whiz with a financial background. I cannot, I need a calculator to figure out. Sometimes just the most basic math, you do not need math, there is absolutely I have not needed any math at all doing this because it’s not about numbers, it’s about patterns, and it’s about understanding what the charts are telling you. And that could be done by anyone from any walk of life. And that’s the beauty of trading.
It’s stressful and chaotic. Yeah, sure. Whenever we watch these movies like Wall Street or Wolf on Wall Street or any of these other stock market movies, it’s like flashing screens and lights and everything like this, right? Yeah, this will totally stress me out. But you don’t. I have one chart. I used my laptop because we travel one chart and that is it. And no Gidget’s, no gadgets, one chart. But I do not need all these buzzing lights and all over the place and softwoods and indicator’s algorithms box.
And that’s the other thing. When you are looking at many different instruments, you need multiple charts. But you could go with one instrument, one instrument, and that’s all you need to master. Remember, like a music student, Liberace, his mastery was the piano, right? We all know that. I’m sure if you picked up the guitar, he would be awesome at it. But what he was doing great at that one instrument. Find your one instrument and that’s the one to master.
All right. News and research. We hear about this all the time that we have to sit and do all this research and news. To me, they are just melodramatic telenovelas, right? I’ve been living in Central America too long, but telenovelas is literally the soap operas of Latin America, right? It is nonsense. It is a bunch of experts just wanting to hear themselves talk. It’s a lie. You do not need to do that at all if you’re trading.
What do we have in front of us? Our charts. And when we start to read what the charts are telling us, that’s all we need. We do not need to sit and be bombarded by these experts who have their own agenda telling us what is good or what is bad. Massive myth. OK, market research. Again, you do not need to do all this crazy research because at the end of the day, it’s going to be in front of you in front of your charts.
Now, the other thing is, and this is a biggie, a lot of new traders, and I was just as guilty. We believe that we have to be in and out of trades all the time. No, that is a huge misconception. Huge today. If you talk to real professional traders, they might get in one or two really strong, really high probability trades. It’s literally like a hunter. I hate this analogy, but it’s the best analogy out there.
Real hunters, when they go out for the big game, are they going to be shooting at a little prairie cat and the prairie dog or what? A field mice? No, they’re going for the big parade, so they will spend hours and patients looking for it. That is day trading. You can go for one, too. Sometimes you’ll go for three. I highly doubt it because you’ll be really happy with those two super powerful good traits.
You do not need to be in and out of trades all the time. And to be honest with you, you’re going to end up losing money with commissions alone when you do that, right? So you want to go for that big one. OK, my personal motto is “The most radical way to treat trade is conservatively” being a conservative trader is actually sustainable. Aggressive behavior going for those huge who knows what. It does not work towards the end.
OK, so it is really important to just do conservative trades and you could all do that because smaller profits will lead you to bigger profits yearly. OK, going for big targets that look superb really on paper and are all romantic. They don’t work out at the end because the risk is super high. And all we ever hear about those big targets is about the winds. But we don’t actually hear about those people talking about their big losses. So be aware.
Be aware of what you’re actually hearing. OK, FOMAT, you’ve all heard of FOMO. We’ve all heard of foam, right? Fear of missing out. Guess what FOMO or I call it fFOMA, fear of missing a trade. It is a huge issue in the trading world because people start to believe that there aren’t other trades out there and they start to chase those trade. There is always another trade coming, there is always another trade coming. So bring that into your head and remember, always another trade coming. Do not fall into that.
OK, now one really important thing is that people think when you’re trading, it’s all about the stocks. Well. Here is a newsflash for you. No, stock market actually makes up less than 25 percent of all the different types of trades. You could be doing twenty-five percent, to be honest. At this point, 20 percent. Why no? forex we’ve all heard of forex. It is foreign exchange. It’s when you are exchanging currencies.
Right. This is a really cool thing to do if you understand how to do forex. The other one is stocks. Equities, right. We understand. The thing is with equities, there’s over 5000 of them. Right. So we have to then narrow down into the different sectors, meaning technology, pharmaceuticals, entertainment. Right. Because you can just do all equities. You want to really niche it down. Remember, you want to focus on specifics.
And then we have the big caps, the small caps, the penny stocks. There’s a lot. So you need to really understand which one you want to laser in on. And futures, commodities. We’ve all heard of these, right? We saw crude gold also indexes. You could trade different indexes with S&P, the Russell and Q, the NASDAQ. Great. So that is also huge and actually probably the biggest day trading market. And we have options. You could certainly do options as well. And don’t forget crypto guys, and I’m not talking about Bitcoin. Bitcoin is one, believe it or not, cryptocurrency. There are over six thousand projects out there. Again, it depends on what you’re going to want to really focus on when you are day-trading. Now, we’re talking a lot of different markets. So whenever you hear somebody say, oh, so you trade stocks, remember, they don’t know what they’re talking about,
That means, you, first of all, don’t take any advice from them. Secondly, you can explain to them, or you could be like, no, I treat other stuff and leave it alone.
OK, now this is a huge one, guys, because people believe in their broker. This is the deal, guys. What a broker is there for? What is the business of a broker? Commissions and your money. Do you get that brokers are here for commissions and your money.
And what a lot of brokers do is they tell you they will give you a margin account. Now, this is the biggest lie out there. What are margin accounts? They tell you that if you have twenty-five thousand dollars or a certain amount of money, they will give you a debt against that, meaning that if you’re going in, and you want to buy whatever, and you don’t have enough money, you can borrow from them. So what happens then?
And if you lose, you lose it. All right. They’re not doing you a favor. They know that they got you. So when you borrow money from them now, you’ve lost more money than you had before, and you have to pay them back and that’s how you have to pay them interest. So remember, you do not need a margin account. You could tell the broker when you are ready to start trading, trading because they will be calling you and telling you have to trade.
You have to. When you started when you started ignoring their business, they’re selling you their services, which is charging you commissions. Remember that very clearly. OK, now let’s talk about commissions, because like I said before, when you are trading, you need to focus on an instrument. So if you focus on, let’s say, futures, you want to work with a futures broker. They are going to give you the best commissions. Right?
If I’m going to be doing crypto, I want to find the best crypto exchange. Right. I don’t want to do an equity that also has a little bit of crypto. They’re going to not be able to do the best thing for me and not give me the proper commission. OK, so you have to figure out exactly which one you want, and you need “live feed”. Live feed is like gas in your car. If you do not have buy in real time feed because your broker or whoever is giving a twenty-minute delay, that is not real.
You cannot be twenty minutes behind in your car. You need to be At that moment and that is the feed. OK, platforms. This is so important for a day trader. You cannot be a Formula One driver in a minivan. You cannot be a day trader with Robin Hood or, you know, quick tiny little crappy apps on your phone or even free, crappy stuff on your computer platform is your car. It is the most important thing.
OK, once you get the platform, they should have all the indicators, everything you need, but you need a good platform. Just like a pianist needs a piano to play. You cannot just be tapping along on the table. OK, so these are the myth in day trading. Get over them and I can guarantee you your trading is going to go to the next level. If you have any questions, you could check me out. I have lots of great videos for you to check out on the channel, just subscribe below, hit that notification button, or you could send me questions that thetraderchick@Gmail.com. All right, guys, bust those myths and let’s have fun trading.
