If you are looking for a way to earn an income, and you do not have a full-time job, you may have considered day trading. Day trading, as you probably know, is an intense occupation which usually requires sitting in front of a computer screen for several hours a day making many trades.

It is an occupation that has really only come into existence for the regular person with the widespread use of the Internet. Before that, you could day trade by going to an office set up for like-minded people, but at-home access was usually not possible. Having to call your broker to place a trade, as in the old-fashioned days, just would not work for day trading.

CFDs allow you to leverage your funds which increases the potential profit. They do not need stamp duty to be paid, as required when you actually buy stocks and shares, so they are an excellent way of day trading. The minor disadvantage of CFDs, that you pay a nominal interest charge for each day that you hold them, is only a problem for buy and hold investors. When you day trade, you will usually settle all your positions every day so that you are not subject to the vagaries of the market moving overnight. As the interest charge is only made if you hold a CFD overnight, it does not matter to the regular day trader, who will pay no additional fees.

You will require a real-time trading platform, which updates continually as the trading happens. Your broker will usually supply you with software as part of your subscription to the live service. You will find it almost essential to practice trading with a demo account before risking your money, as the action can take place quickly, and you need to be able to make your decisions with precision.

Day trading is making profit from small movements in the market, either up or down. The CFD is ideal for this, as it is as easy to take a short position as a long position using CFDs, and there is usually good liquidity to ensure execution of your order. To make a worthwhile profit at day trading, you need to make sufficient gains from small movements in price. If you day trade regular stocks, this means you need a large amount of capital at risk. This is less of an issue with CFDs because of the leverage which may be 10 to 1 or better. This means decent profits are more readily obtainable. Even so, to make effective profits you will need to have access to a reasonable amount of capital, which is why day trading is generally regarded as an option best exercised by experienced traders.

An additional advantage of CFDs compared to stocks is that the commission rate is usually very low, and in some cases such as trading indexes there is no commission, only the spread between bid and ask prices. Most CFDs have good liquidity as they reflect the underlying stocks liquidity, another essential for the day trader who needs to be able to act quickly.

If you are seriously considering day trading CFDs, then you need to not only study your strategies and trading plan, but also consider the emotional side of the work. A lot has been written about the role of emotion in trading, and because of the pace, day trading amplifies any problems that you may have controlling fear and greed, two powerful emotions which are considered by many to be the chief psychological challenges to trading.

One of the keys to successful day trading is that your strategies are selected to be straightforward and easy to identify. In a typical scenario, you do not have the time to go away for a cup of coffee while considering whether to enter or exit a trade. Thus it is essential that you have a clear plan of how you are going to trade the market, and are emotionally equipped to execute that plan the moment each trigger point is reached.

As CFDs involve far less capital than the actual value of the shares, there is a potential for you to lose more than you have paid. That is the price you pay for having the enormous leverage which these financial instruments give you, and which you can exploit to increase the size of your profit. Once again, this means that you need to know and be confident with what you are doing before you enter the turmoil and stress of live day trading.

The majority of traders fail to make a profit, and you need to be clear on the parameters which you are looking for to implement your strategy. Depending on your plan, you may have several time frames of charts open at the same time, with the longer term, say one hour chart, indicating the general trend of the price, but a five-minute chart to determine the point of entry. You will find it useful to have more than one computer screen so that you can keep your eye on the intensity of the action.

Some day traders make a practice of having CNN on in the background in order to keep up with the financial news. The news headlines are also made available on some broker trading platforms, and this provides a convenient reference if you want to trade the news.