You may have recently seen one of my favorite TV commercials. It shows various scenes of deserted professions with a plaintive voice-over: an abandoned car ("Maybe mechanics should go back to fixing cars"); a pregnant woman in labor in the back seat of a taxi ("Maybe cabdrivers should go back to taking care of their fares"); the empty corridors of a hospital ("Maybe doctors should go back to treating their patients"); a woman seated in the abandoned pews of a church, while a stock ticker scrolls above and behind her ("Maybe we don't all need to be day traders").

One point of this commercial to me is that in our daily fixation on the stock screen and the feverish race to day-trade our way to millions, the rest of our life may be passing by unnoticed & unengaged.

Maybe we don't all need to be day traders. At least not that way.

Is there some way we can be successful day traders and still have a life?

I think so. I've "been there, done that" with the former scenario, and now I'm living the latter. And you can, too. Whether you're a recovering daytradeaholic or a day-trader wannabe.

I don't have a twelve-step program to recommend for your rehabilitation, but let me offer a few suggestions based on my experience.

Instead of staying glued to the tube every trading hour, maybe you could develop or acquire a day-trading system that provides entry signals early in the day, or even the prior evening. Use stop-loss & profit target trading orders with your broker or online trading program. Exit your active trades at the end of the day.

If you're hopelessly addicted to intra-day trading, perhaps you could taper off by selecting two or three intra-day strategies that generate trading signals only at specific times of the day. For example, after the market has been open a half-hour or 45 minutes. Or a strategy that takes advantage of the volatility swings around an exchange's lunch hour.

Instead of trying frantically to keep up with a panoply of potential stock trades, maybe you could look at alternative ways of participating in broader stock market fluctuations that only require you to track and analyze a few key price, volatility, and trend indicators. Like stock index futures. Or stock index options. Or perhaps you could decide to focus only on an industry you know reasonably well and can stay on top of breaking news -- like "biotech stocks on the NASDAQ" for example.

These options could also put your day trading on the fast-track to real profits. You could quickly get a handle on your time commitment, and focus on results instead of endless data collection and frantic split-second decision-making.

Make changes. Make your day-trading program work for you instead of the other way 'round. Get your life back -- and make your day-trading program yield the exciting results you hoped for when you got hooked on this action in the first place.

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Chaz X. Lang is one of the authors of
"The 3-Minute E-Mini Trading System"™
(http://www.e-mini-profits.com)
He has been analyzing and trading stock index futures successfully since 1994, and has specialized in the S&P 500 E-Mini since its inception in 1997. He can be contacted by email at
contact@e-mini-profits.com

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