Book excerpt: The Truth About Day Trading Stocks A realistic guide to day trading today's stock market In terms of the potential for heavy financial losses, day trading is a high-risk profession. No one should contemplate day trading without giving thought to the ways he can lose, and all the ways to lessen or avoid them. Yet many people enter the game with unrealistic expectations, unaware of what it takes to succeed. Seminars and software alone do not make a successful day trader, cautions author Josh DiPietro. Instead, a trader must learn hard lessons of self-discipline, consistency, and staying in the game for the long haul to have a real chance of success. In The Truth About Day Trading Stocks, DiPietro offers the amateur day trader a brutally honest look at the pitfalls of day trading—and how to hopefully avoid them. Written in an engaging and sometimes humorous tone, The Truth About Day Trading Stocks draws on the author's own experiences as a day trader to offer a clear-cut departure from typical "golden goose" strategies promising instant wealth. Instead, he attempts to slow down the dangerous fervor of the average amateur and demonstrate the ways you can become a professional and not lose your shirt in the process. The Truth About Day Trading Stocks shows how trading decisions are bent and shaped by emotions, and why it is critical to know yourself, understand risk, and remember that increasing your skill level is a gradual, ongoing process—there's always more to learn! After dispensing with popular illusions, DiPietro proceeds to offer realistic, practical trading advice—comparing pay-per-trade with pay-per-share brokers, determining which works best and when, offering suggestions on how to avoid the prospect of perfect trades turning ugly, and more. At the end of the book, he also includes a section called "Rules to Remember," a list of over eighty rules, simply stated and easy to grasp, to benefit amateurs' performance. Throughout the book, the author describes his development of acute self-awareness while figuring out how to succeed. Through that blunt self-portrayal, the goal of The Truth About Day Trading Stocks is to help you create a disciplined mind-set and apply it to your own successful trading style.