Most trading systems taught today emphasize principles or techniques in a general sense and use historical examples to show how they work. That means they're shams. If they really worked, the outfit providing the training would teach it in real-time, rather than cherry-picking past examples of where it worked and not bothering to point out that there were many times as many examples where it didn't work. If they aren't demonstrating it to you in real-time, don't put your money on the table.

If you've taken an investing or trading course and believe you have a good handle on the technique, then make sure you paper-trade it for a few months before you try it with real money, and then use only a small amount of real money until you are consistently achieving your goal.

As always in the stock market, never trade more than you can afford to lose - really!

You can try out the service for three days free when you sign up. A credit card is required, and will be billed automatically after the three days if you have not called or emailed to cancel. Every automatic renewal charge has a pro-rated money-back refund policy. Any portion of the month that has not elapsed will be cheerfuly refunded.

Our day trader training webinar is a subscription service. Click the tab on the menu bar above to "Join a Day Trading Session" to sign up now.

We STRONGLY recommend this, and for most people, it's as easy a plugging in an extra monitor to your computer.
 
Many newer computers, including most laptops, are already set up with an extra monitor port. Just plug in the extra monitor and turn on the computer. You should then get prompts to ask you how you want them set up. The choice you want on a PC (vs. a Mac, which we know nothing about) is Extended Desktop. This lets you click and drag anything that is not in "full screen" mode from one monitor to the other. If a window is in full screen mode, shrink it first, then you can click and drag using the top-most bar on the window.
 
If your computer does not have an extra monitor port, then you need to add a new video card. The best way to go is to get a dual monitor card, rather than adding another single monitor card. The dual monitor cards are now very inexpensive and much easier to set up than two single-monitor cards. (You can even have four monitors by buying two of these dual-monitor cards.) You can pick up a really nice monitor at Dell for as little as $120-$150 and a good dual monitor video card for $25-$40. www.dell.com, or stop by your nearest Best Buy, tell them what kind of system you have, and they'll recommend a card.
 
I'm sorry, but we cannot offer support for setting up dual monitors because there are so many different video cards, computers and monitors.

When you first log on to the webinar platform, you should see a small pink rectangle near the upper right corner of your screen. Click on the little arrows on the left and this should open up and show you a box called "Questions." The Question box is where you will see Gregory's comments being posted to explain what he's doing on the trading screen and why. You can also ask Gregory questions there, and you are encouraged to do so, but don't expect a quick answer in the middle of trading!
 
We strongly recommend that you "detach" the Questions section by clicking the icon NEXT TO the "X" that is to the right of the word "Questions." This detaches the Questions box and then you can change the size and drag it anywhere you want. You can then click the little arrows again to shrink the remainder of the pink control panel.
 
If you have your computer speakers on, you should hear a beep whenever Gregory posts a trade decision. He sometimes switches from just using this chat box to full audio. He'll announce this in the chat box in case your speakers are off so you can turn them on if you want to hear him talking about the charts and the trades. When he is using full audio, he will still post the trade decisions, but not make other comments in the chat box.
 
Please note that you are watching everything Gregory is doing in real-time, with no delay, so you can follow right along and make virtually the same trades he makes if you choose. In the Questions box, you will see general discussion, as well as trades being called, such as "Buy 25% FAS now," which means Gregory is allocating 25% of the webinar portfolio to FAS immediately. Most trades of ETFs are made in 25% increments. Most trades of options are made in 5% or 10% increments. You can adjust this to suit your own risk tolerance and trading style, if you choose to follow Gregory's trades.
 
Here's what else is on the screen: There are usually three charts for SPY, an ETF that tracks the S&P 500, One shows 1-minute bars, another shows 5-minute bars and the third shows 30-minute bars. There are usually two DOW charts, (DJX and DIA). These are usually displayed in 1-minute bars and are used for Mr. Spear's proprietary DOW Gap Strategy. Other charts will be the trading instruments of choice, often an option on SPY and FAS or FAZ.
 
Gregory often draws trendlines or does other studies on the charts and explains his rules and reasons for these.
 
Gregory has set up his own brokerage screen to allow "one-click trading" which lets him simply click once on the bid or the ask price to create an order and send it to the exchange. It is set up so that if he clicks the ask price, he automatically buys a certain dollar amount of the security, such as $5,000, and if he clicks the bid price, he automatically sells the same dollar amount of the security. This feature can be set up to create a limit order at the current market price, or to add or subtract a penny or two to the market price to create the limit price for the order. Each automatic buy order can also be set up with an automatic stop-loss order or trailing stop order. We recommend using a broker that has tools like this to assist active traders in placing trades with "one click" so time is not lost to creating and sending orders.
 
When Gregory calls a trade, he posts a real-time execution price a few seconds later in the same chat window so that the price available at the time of the "call" is recorded right there in the Chat archive. Often you can get a much better price, because of course Gregory does not hit the exact top and bottom of each swing - that would be impossible.

Here's what a subscription to DayTraderHotline.com - Gregory's Trading Desk provides:
 
Our training on how to spot high-probability trades is conducted in an on-line seminar ("webinar") using real-time charts and making real time trade decisions. Others look at historical charts and say what they would have done, which opens up the possibility of cherry-picking examples where a certain kind of analysis works and ignoring many more examples where it doesn't work. We want you to see how to make these assessments of probability in the time frame necessary to be able to trade them and we want you to see that it works. Nothing can teach you that except watching us do it, and explain it, in real time. No cherry-picking! You see it all! 
 
Email and/or text messages to your phone:
 
If you want to be sure you don't miss any trades being demonstrated by Gregory, we can send the full trade information by email or text message. Just tell us where to send it. You will typically get a dozen or so messages each day that the webinar is operating.
 
Concrete Profit Target:
 
Gregory has a profit target of 0.5% to 1.5% per day on the whole portfolio. Because we trade options, gains have been as high as 50% or 60% per day, and sometime we have multiple days of consecutive losses, although we strongly recommend using a Portfolio Stop Loss limit of around 5% per day. 
 
Our daily profit target is small, because smaller targets are easier to achieve, and that means taking less risk by spending less time in the market. If achieved every trading day, 0.5% would yield about 250% per year.  1% would yield over 1100% per year. 
 
Real Time Charts:
 
The service includes real time viewing of Gregory's real time charts, his "Trading Desk," on your computer screen. You can watch him draw trend lines and support and resistance lines on the charts, see his explanations of what the charts are telling him, and see see his real time trade decisions with full explanations.
 
Real Time Trade Decisions ("calls"):
 
Gregory will "call" a trade in our chat box, then post the real-time price in the chat box, usally within a second or two. You can, of course, see the real time price yourself on the charts, or on your own real-time service if you have one, so the purpose of the price posting is just to determine our performance for the day. It is not a recommended price limit for the trade - it is just the real-time market price at the time of the call. If you choose to follow Gregory's calls, you can most often get the same or better prices as the ones we post because rarely does a stock go straight up on a buy or straight down on a sell - nobody's that good! 
 
Gregory does not teach or perform exotic or complicated trades. Just simple buys and sells, usually using ETFs or options on ETFs. We normally have just ONE position open at a time.
 
12 Trading Rules to kill for:
 
These alone are worth a fortune. When you subscribe, the full detail version of these rules will be available to you on the website.
 
Subscribership is strictly limited to 250 traders at any one time to limit our market impact.

We normally trade just one or two symbols per day, making several round-trip trades each day. When trading ETFs, each transaction is typically for 25% of the value of the portfolio, so we may use several trades to get in and several trades to get out of a position and complete a trade. Often, we use simple option calls or puts, and will use 5% or 10% increments of capital to trade those, typically not exceeding 30% of capital in an option.
 
This number of trades is typical for day trading, where the strategy is to capture very small gains on each trade, which is not too difficult, and compound those gains.
 
We use stop loss amounts that are different for each security we trade..

Spear's Day Trader Subscription normally costs $1,337 per month. While we still have Charter Subscriber seats available, the price is just $997, a 25% discount. This price is guaranteed for life for Charter Subscribers. This works out to just $47 per trading day, with a pro-rated refund available at any time for any days remaining in the subscription period. Once we have reached our limit of 250 Charter Subscriber seats, there will be a waiting list for entry and the price will be $1337. Reserve a seat now to guarantee the Charter Subscriber rate. Go to our Home page and click Join a Day Trading Session on the toolbar.

In general, the principles and techniques we teach can be applied to other markets, but one of the principles is that you need to get to know your market before you trade it. The patterns you want to trade will be somewhat different for each equity or fund you are working with, which is why we tend to use just a handful of instruments in our work.

Unless otherwise noted, Gregory Spear, the President of  Independent Investor Inc., is the analyst making all of the comments, chart manipulations, and trade decisions in the DTH webinar platform.  An assistant may provide occasional notes on the platform at the immediate direction of Mr. Spear.

If you have a brokerage with very low commissions so that you can trade for about a penny per share or less, then you can start with any amount, but the SEC has a rule that makes our kind of trading impossible if you don't have more than $25,000 in the account. You don't need to TRADE that much, but there needs to be that much in the account to do our kind of trading. Here's how that works:

 Most of the kinds of trades we discuss qualify as day trades according to the SEC; that is, in and out in the same trading day. According to SEC rules, you can’t make more than three day trades in any five-trading-day period (on a rolling basis) without being classified as a day-trader and this triggers a requirement that you have at least $25,000 in the account being traded. If you have less than $25,000 in the account, or the account value drops below $25,000 and you have exceeded this limit of three day-trades in a five-day period, the SEC requires your broker to freeze your account from starting new positions. Your account will be frozen until you deposit more money to bring the account over $25,000 or until five trading days have passed and you have promised in writing to not do this again.

 So, you can use our techniques in any account with any amount of money, but IF YOU HAVE LESS THAN $25,000 IN THE ACCOUNT, then as soon as you make three day trades within any five-day period, you cannot start a new position for the next 5 days!

 We typically make several trades a day, so you really can't follow our method if you have less than $25,000 in your account.  In practical terms, you should have at least $28,000 in your account to start, because you can’t count on your very first trades necessarily being successful, even if you have been successful for a while on a paper-trading basis.

 As always, never trade more than you can afford to lose - for example, just because you must have $25,000 in the account for SEC purposes to qualify for day-trading doesn't mean you have to trade with it all! As long as you have a per-share commission structure and the cost is low, you can do our style of frequent trading with $1,000 or $5,000 within your $25,000+ account, and leave the rest in cash or in longer-term investments that are less risky.

We announce stop loss amounts to accompany nearly all of our trade decisions in the webinar we also strongly suggest a daily overall stop loss on the value of your portfolio. Both are merely suggestions and should be adjusted to your own trading style and risk tolerance. In order to avoid competing with other subscribers for trades at the same price, try not to use exactly the levels we announce. For example, if we are using a 5% stop on an option trade, and you get the same price we get on that trade, you might want to set your stop at 4.7% or 5.2% or some other approximation of this amount so you will be less likely to be trying to trade at exactly the same price as other subscribers. As the stops that we announce are only suggestions, you might also decide that for your personal risk tolerance, you will use a more conservative (but not necessarily more profitable) 3.5% instead, or 7%, allowing the trade more "room to move." Whatever you decide, try to stick with the same number on each trade for a number of days or weeks before deciding that it should be adjusted. Avoid allowing yourself to adjust stops more frequently, because more frequent decisions are more likely to be emotional.
 
Our own stops are tuned to the securities we are trading and are announced with the trades. They may range from 0.25% (one quarter of one percent) to 10% or more, depending upon the normal, expected volatility of the security.
 
A DAILY stop loss on the value of your portfolio is also highly recommended. We recommend about 5% for this value, so if your portfolio value drops by this amount at any time during the day, you would sell and not trade again that day. This helps to guard against emotional trading. You can't normally get to a 5% loss without making mistakes, and if you are in that mindset, it is best to get out and let your head clear for the rest of the day and overnight before trading again.
 
The exact amount of your daily stop loss is up to you, and depends upon your own risk tolerance, both your financial risk tolerance, and your psychological risk tolerance. Know yourself, and set this number above the level at which you are prone to rationalizing and perhaps acting in desperation. These behaviors are not faults - they are normal, human emotional responses to loss and our job is to understand when these psychological patterns are likely to be operating, to be able to take pre-emptive measures (such as using automatic stops and then leaving them alone!) and to be able to recognize when they begin to operate and then take corrective action.
 
All brokers allow stop loss limits to be set on individual trades. Some, like InteractiveBrokers.com allow these to be set automatically when your place your trade, using pre-set dollar or percentage amounts. The better brokers like IB allow you to use the bid, the ask, or the "last" price as the trigger for your stop, and then the stop may either convert to a limit order that is above or below that trigger level by the amount you specify, or, once the stop is triggered it may then convert to a "market" order to guarantee execution. Some brokers may also allow you to set overall value stops on your whole portfolio, and automatically liquidate your holdings there, or at least issue you an alert if this overall portfolio value stop is hit.
 
We strongly recommend using automatic stops if possible, because the whole idea is to remove the emotional component from the equation, and if you rely on yourself to enforce a "mental stop," then you are expecting yourself to be unemotional just when you are most likely to not be acting rationally, in the face of a mounting loss!
 
Removing or adjusting stops may be tempting, if for example, your automatic stop happens to be just at the level when you are expecting a floor, based on charting principles, but if you save this decision for when the stop is about to be hit, then moving the stop is almost always a bad idea. Try to look at the level of the stop right after the trade and the stop are placed, and make your decision THEN on whether to RAISE or lower your stop. Don't save that decision for when the stop is about to get hit - you are not likely to be in the most objective frame of mind at that moment. KNOW YOURSELF and use stops accordingly, to help you avoid pitfalls that you have seen in your own trading patterns.
 
You can learn how to use stops that work best with the securities you trade and that work best with your own risk tolerance by using a paper-trading account. InteractiveBrokers.com has these, and they operate exactly the same way a live account operates, including "charging" the account for normal fees and commissions, so you can practice as long as you want to at no cost and no risk, until you are confident that you can profitably trade a live account.

You don't need a great deal of experience, but if you are just beginning to invest in the stock market, you should NOT start with day trading! We recommend our weekly publication, The Spear Report, also edited by Gregory Spear. You can find The Spear Report at www.spearreportpro.com. We also publish Spear's ETF Analyst, at www.spear'sETFanalyst.com.  Here at DTH, we try to use plain English and to define terms as we go, but you may have to prompt us occasionally to use less jargon, because after awhile in this field, you don't remember anymore what's jargon and what's plain English. 
 
If you have moderate experience as an investor or a trader, but no experience in day trading, DayTraderHotline may be a good service for you, because we do not use complicated trade combinations or exotic instruments and no specialized software or data feeds are required. That said, start slowly here and be careful not to jump in with both feet before you understand the basic lay of the land. At many brokerages, including our recommended one, InteractiveBrokers.com, you can set up a paper-trading portfolio to try your hand at day trading without risking any money at all.
 
If you have day traded unsuccessfully before, then you should "wipe your mind clean" of all the advice you've ever gotten, because you shouldn't hang on to techniques that don't work, no matter how many "experts" tell you they do work if you simply know how to use them correctly! If you are already day trading successfully, then we hope we can add value to your existing practice.
 
Remember that frequent trading increases risk and day trading has the most risk because of its higher frequency trading. The high frequency of trades can cause prohibitive commission costs, depending upon your broker, and can cause you to compound losses. Never risk more capital in the stock market than you can afford to lose, but especially in day trading - REALLY. 

First and foremost, you need discipline and you don't need much else. You cannot be successful as a trader unless you have the ability to carry out your own decisions without second-guessing them every step of the way. A seat-of-the-pants trader is never successful because emotion always gets in the way – in fact, a seat-of-the-pants trader is trading almost exclusively on emotion. This kind of trader usually thinks s/he is performing analysis of the news or analysis of price and volume, but it is really just emotional reactions to those things, not analysis at all, and that is almost certain to fail over virtually any time frame. If you don't have and follow rules, then you are trading by emotion, the deadliest of trader sins.

"Sophisticated" technical analysts are among the worst traders because they think they are being scientific by using complicated formulas, but in fact, most technical indicators, especially the more complex ones, can be read any way you want to read them, and the trader can also select which indicator s/he wants to follow in any given situation, adding another level of subjectivity to the trading decision. Most technical analysts "interpret" the data to support the trading decision they have already made unconsciously, or to support the trade they have actually already made, and they don't have a clue that their choices of indicators, time frames and interpretation are all being governed by emotion.

Our service helps you to avoid emotional trading by providing a firm set of simple, common sense principles and clear guidance on how to implement them. We don't just train you in abstract principles, though. We show you in real time how to do it with specific advice on exactly what to do, when, and why. Along the way, we also point out the pitfalls and temptations that get in the way of successful trading.

There are many good brokerages for day trading, but our top recommendation is InteractiveBrokers.com. Compare their tools and commissions to everyone else and we think you'll agree that they are tops.

We highly recommend establishing a brokerage account at a firm that is set up for frequent trading and has a very low commission structure. It should allow “paper-trading” so you can practice using real account tools without using real money. You should also be able to set up an online trading screen so that you can make a trade with no more than two or three clicks of your mouse and no typing, or better yet, just one click. This is possible, for example, if your brokerage allows you to set up a default for each security you want to trade, so when you want to buy XYZ, you just click the ask price shown for XYZ and depending on the settings you’ve selected, you will automatically buy either a certain number of shares, or a certain percentage of your account’s value, or a certain dollar amount of value, and buy it at the current ask price or current bid, or the bid plus two cents or the ask minus two cents, or any limit you define, etc. The ability to execute a trade almost instantaneously is critically important to successful short-term trading in the style that we present. If you don’t have such a broker, we recommend InteractiveBrokers.com. 

Yes. You can't use margin with IRA's or 401k's (except "Reg. T margin" - see below), but you can day trade these retirement accounts as long as they contain more than the SEC minimum of $25,000 for a day trading account, and by using bearish ETFs, you can even go short. You do need to have something called "Reg. T Margin" on the account in order to use the proceeds of a sell to buy a new position without waiting for the sell trade to settle. Just ask your broker to add "Reg. T Margin" to your account.

There are many important considerations for when to sell a holding, such as trend lines, trending swing highs and swing lows, volume patterns and price/volume support and resistance areas, not to mention the changing fundamentals, or perceived changes in fundamentals, of both markets and individual equities. What should never be considered is how much profit is in your pocket, because this cannot possibly effect what's going to happen next in the market, and our one and only job is predicting what's going to happen next in the market. Profit targets in general are inconsistent with the principle of following the tape. 
 
That said, because of natural volatility in the market, when we use our normal buy signals, we have found that small moves up can be reliably achieved and larger moves are much more likely to suffer intervening pullbacks which inherently present the danger of larger corrections. Therefore, we are often quick to exit a trade with small profits, simply because larger moves are so much less common. We will usually wait for some sign of the likely end of a rally, however, before pulling the "sell" trigger.

Fire your broker. In any account, retirement or regular, you do need to have something called "Reg. T Margin" on the account in order to use the proceeds of a sell to buy a new position without waiting for the sell trade to settle. Just ask your broker to add "Reg. T Margin" to your account, then ask why s/he didn't tell you that you could do this, and if s/he still says you can't do it, call another broker. Research brokers carefully for day trading resources, commissions and margin rates. We highly recommend InteractiveBrokers.com. Their tools are amazing, and we are unaware of anyone who can match their incredibly low commissions for day traders. Those are listed on their website.

The Questions block in the software can be detached and sized or moved anywhere you want on your monitor(s). To detach the Questions block, click the icon NEXT TO the "X" found to the right of the word "Questions." Once detached, you can change the size by dragging the sides of the box or move it by dragging the title bar.

You can also minimize the rest of the webinar software block by clicking the white arrows on the left edge of the block. You can't change the text size in the questions box except by changing the resolution of your display through your computer's Control Panel.

No. Sharing of a username and password is prohibited and simultaneous logins are not permitted. If two users try to log in with the same username and password, both users will be locked out. If you need to log in from a different computer from your normal one, be sure you are logged out from the normal one before you try to log in from the second one or you may be locked out.

Day trading, and our service, are not for everyone. Please call Customer Service at 1-800-491-7119 for a pro-rated credit if you need to cancel.

No, and in fact, that would probably be a bad idea. Depending on the securites being discussed here, we might be in cash at the end of each day, reducing risk of large overnight price movements, which can be important when trading leveraged ETF's for example, or we could be holding positions for several days. In either case, for any given day, there may be no new trades that we can recommend because we try to make only high probability trades, and while we can usually spot at least one of these per day, sometimes we just don't see any at all. The training will be teaching you, largely by following our real-time assessments of the market, how to judge these probabilities yourself and know when to trade, and when to step aside.

If members choose to follow my trades, then depending upon how much they are trading, this creates the possibility of market impact. While the equity instruments we trade have plenty of liquidity, so that it is difficult to influence them, it is still possible and we would like to avoid that, for all of our sakes.We don't want members competing with each other for good prices. We are increasingly using options, which do have less liquidity than underlying equities, so keeping the number of traders down is especially important now.