How to find the best day trading platform (2024)

What’s a day trading platform?

A day trading platform is the technology used to facilitate the trade of financial instruments, enabling positions to be opened and closed within a single day. This trading style isn't suitable for people seeking to trade in the longer term.

When trading with us, a fee will be charged to your account for keeping your intraday trade open until the following day.

Note that there’s a difference between an online broker and a trading platform. An online broker provides the platform, while the platform facilitates the trading activity on the financial markets. An online broker like us enables you to open a brokerage account for trading derivatives in the financial markets.

Our trading platform will enable you to trade using a popular derivative product: contracts for difference (CFDs). Derivatives are leveraged products, meaning you’ll amplify your exposure on the markets. Leverage will magnify the profits and losses you make on your day trades, so be sure to manage your risk carefully.

How to find the best day trading platform

To find the best day trading platform, there are several things to take into consideration. These include your experience as a trader, trading goals, the types of assets you’d like to trade, costs and charges involved and the type of support you’ll be offered.

1. Consider your experience and trading goals

Taking your experience and trading goals into consideration when venturing into day trading will enable you to have clear goals in mind. This will ensure you put in the time to practise and fine-tune your trading style and strategy before you open your first position.

You can use fundamental analysis as part of your trading style or plan to predict market price movements and use technical indicators for your strategy. Your strategy is determined by your preferences and the level of risk you’re willing to be exposed to when trading the markets.

If you’re a beginner, you’ll need to choose the trading strategy that suits your preferences. For example, if you choose to use scalping as your day trading strategy, you’d make lots of small trades of the asset you’re trading with the aim of profiting from the little price changes.

Once you’ve chosen your scalping strategy, it's important that you diligently stick to it as one impromptu move may lead to a trade that results in a huge loss. Your aim is to make a series of small wins from your trade and benefit from them instead of a few large ones.

You can learn more about trading strategies by visiting our analyse and learn section on the website or IG Academy. You can also try out these trading strategies by opening a demo account with us and practise with $200,000 virtual funds in a risk-free simulated real-world environment. Once you've gained confidence as a trader, you can open a live account with us.

2. Learn key day trading concepts

There are some essential day trading concepts you’ll need to educate yourself on when it comes to the financial markets:

  • Volatility – intraday trading will require that you have the ability to identify if the market price has sufficient movement to present profit-making opportunities. This is known as ‘volatility’, which measures how much an asset’s price moves over a period of time
  • Liquidity – this describes how easy it would be to open or close a position in the markets without the asset’s price being affected. A rising demand for an asset increases its liquidity, meaning you can take or close positions at the price you want. With us, you’ll get deep internal liquidity, giving you access to several buyers and sellers, which will assist with the quick execution on your trade
  • Volume – this provides details on the number of times an asset has been traded over a certain timeframe and is a key indicator of the market’s liquidity. You can trade volume as a strategy to identify entry and exit points in the markets. For instance, a rise in volume when there’s a sharp movement in the market is indicative of the market maintaining that direction in the future

3. Find out about day trading products and assets

CFDs are one of the main day trading products used. These are leveraged products that will increase your market exposure at a fraction of the full value of your trade. But while they’ll magnify your profits when the markets move in your favour, they’ll amplify your losses if they move against you.

Carefully manage your risk and only trade using an amount you’re comfortable losing. With us, there are over 13,000 markets you can trade via CFDs.

How to find the best day trading platform (2024)

FAQs

Which platform is best for day trading? ›

Interactive Brokers (IBKR) remains firmly entrenched as our overall pick as Best Online Broker for Day Trading because it offers among the widest ranges of assets available to trade while charging some of the lowest commissions and margin rates in the industry.

How do you find good stocks for day trading? ›

Stocks with a positive price trend – where the price is consistently moving upward – can provide excellent day trading opportunities. You can identify these trends by using technical analysis tools like moving averages, which smooth out price data to help identify the stock's trend direction over a specific period.

What is the best successful day trading strategy? ›

Scalping is one of the most popular strategies. It involves selling almost immediately after a trade becomes profitable. The price target is whatever figure means that you'll make money on the trade. Fading involves shorting stocks after rapid moves upward.

What is the number one rule in day trading? ›

Learn Proper Position Sizing

Ideal position size will vary by strategy and portfolio size, but a good rule of thumb is you shouldn't risk much more or less than 1% of your portfolio on each trade.

What broker do day traders use? ›

Fidelity Investments provides the core day-trading features well, from research to trading platform to reasonable commissions. The company's flagship platform, Active Trader Pro, offers a fully customizable look while Wealth-Lab Pro, a backtesting tool, lets you test a strategy against 20 years of historical data.

What is a good profit for day trading? ›

Profit Margins

Some traders aim to earn 1%-2.5% of their account balance daily. It should be noted that higher risks usually accompany higher returns and that traders who risk more have a higher potential to blow out their trading accounts. Many profitable traders attest to the importance of proper risk management.

How much money do day traders with $10,000 accounts make per day on average? ›

With a $10,000 account, a good day might bring in a five percent gain, which is $500. However, day traders also need to consider fixed costs such as commissions charged by brokers. These commissions can eat into profits, and day traders need to earn enough to overcome these fees [2].

What is the most profitable time to day trade? ›

The opening period (9:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. Eastern Time) is often one of the best hours of the day for day trading, offering the biggest moves in the shortest amount of time. A lot of professional day traders stop trading around 11:30 a.m. because that is when volatility and volume tend to taper off.

Is day trading worth it? ›

Day trading is a strategy in which investors buy and sell stocks the same day. It is rarely successful, with an estimated 95% loss percentage. Even if you do see a gain, it must be enough to offset fees and taxes, as well.

What is the 11am rule in trading? ›

It is not a hard and fast rule, but rather a guideline that has been observed by many traders over the years. The logic behind this rule is that if the market has not reversed by 11 am EST, it is less likely to experience a significant trend reversal during the remainder of the trading day.

What is the simplest most profitable trading strategy? ›

One of the simplest and most widely known fundamental strategies is value investing. This strategy involves identifying undervalued assets based on their intrinsic value and holding onto them until the market recognizes their true worth.

What is the simplest trading strategy ever? ›

A simple method which doesn't require any analysis or indicator: Open a trade in the direction of the daily candle any time during the day in your own time zone. Don't put a limit. Put a stoploss equal to the length of the candle.

Do you need 25k to day trade? ›

First, pattern day traders must maintain minimum equity of $25,000 in their margin account on any day that the customer day trades. This required minimum equity, which can be a combination of cash and eligible securities, must be in your account prior to engaging in any day-trading activities.

Is Robinhood good for day trading? ›

Absolutely! As long as you abide by the FINRA regulations for pattern day trading, then you can trade to your heart's content with Robinhood's zero-commission trading policy. Robinhood allows users to day trade stocks, ETFs, stock options contracts, and even cryptocurrencies with no trading fees.

Can you day trade with 1000 dollars? ›

Believe it or not, you can start forex day trading with $1,000 or even less. It requires mastering position sizing and managing risks, but if you navigate your way to success, the rewards can be significant.

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