Day Trading For Dummies, 4th Edition

Chapter 3

Assets 101: Stocks, Bonds, Currencies, and Commodities

IN THIS CHAPTER

Finding good assets for day trading

Discovering the basics about stocks

Introducing bonds

Counting cash and currency

Making money from commodities

You have a myriad of choices of things to trade. From those, you want to find a few things that you can firmly understand. This chapter and the next go into details about the different assets that day traders use. Here, I cover the basics. I cover the more advanced assets in Chapter 4.

You can’t trade everything. A day has only so many hours, and your head can hold only so many ideas at any one time. Furthermore, some trading strategies lend themselves better to certain types of assets than others. By finding out more about all the various investment assets available to a day trader, you can make better decisions about what you want to trade and how you want to trade it.

Grasping the Different Things to Trade

In the financial markets, people buy and sell ...