Best of Day

There are thousands of stocks you can trade on any given day. The potential number of trade opportunities can feel overwhelming to the untrained eye. Do you pick popular stocks like Apple or Google to trade? Do you just play IPOs and shoot for a quick flip based on the hype? Maybe you scan the market in hopes of finding stocks that best fit your trading methodology. If you were looking for a simple list of high volume stocks that you can trade everyday and make boat loads of money, you have come to the wrong place. Finding the best stocks to day trade requires work and quite a bit of research on your part. In this article I will illustrate 7 methods you can use to identify the best stocks to day trade.

Start Your Day Early

I am going to cover a number of approaches below that you can use in both the pre-market and during the trading day to identify the best stocks to day trade. Regardless of which approach best fits your day trading style, the one thing required for each selection process is you must get an early start to the trading day. Gone are the days where you can show up at your desk at 9:15 am, log on and start placing trades. The market is getting faster and faster with the increased trading volume from hedge funds. At a minimum, you should start your prep work at 8 am. This will provide you enough time to conduct your morning research and configure your monitors with the stocks you are actively tracking for the day.

#1 Find the Best Stocks to Day Trade with Pre-market Movers

For those of you that have been trading for some period of time you will know that the pre-market is one of the street's favorite ways to head fake you. A stock could be up 6% in the pre-market only to open up 2% at 9:30 am. The reason for the large price swing is due to the thin volume that can carry a stock either way outside of the regular trading session.

I start my scanning at 8:00 am sharp. This gives me a full hour and a half before the market opens to conduct my research. Below is what you want to look for when scanning stocks during the pre-market.