Are you looking for the best day trading apps for beginners? A beginner in day trading may not necessarily be a beginner in investing. In fact, most traders often start out to be long-term investors, but some are drawn to the allure of making big gains every day. The life of a day trader is glorified isn’t it? You see people online post pictures of six or seven-figure profits in a single day. Is it possible? Sure, anything is possible. Is it representative of most traders? Absolutely not.
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Best Day Trading Apps for Beginners
There’s nothing wrong with getting into day trading. In fact, for a lot of people, you can easily make a living by doing a couple of trades per day. It only takes about $400 in profit per trading day to reach an annual profit of $100,000.
Not so bad is it? The best way to approach day trading is to ensure you have the proper tools to give you every edge possible. So we researched the best day trading apps for beginners.
First, day trading more than investing relies on technical analysis and short-term trends. Make sure you have a good charting platform to help boost the odds in your favor.
Second, you have to be able to read the market sentiment. Don’t just read news headlines, but heading to chat groups or discussion boards gets you a feel for how the market is reacting.
Finally, you need a good trading platform that is fast, reliable, and most of all free! Without any of these apps, day trading can turn on you in a hurry.
If you don’t want your account to blow up, check out the three apps we recommend for a successful transition to day trading. Brokers have come a long way with technology. So the best day trading apps for beginners aren’t a long shot.
Now you can trade on the go. As a result, trading and travelling has become extremely popular. If you want to trade in Hawaii, Antarctica, Bali, or Iceland you can.
Technical Analysis and Charting: Tradingview.com
A solid charting platform is the single most important part of being a day trader. You’re no longer looking at the long-term outlook for a company. Instead, you look for short-term catalysts, and trends that appear on the charts. Stocks behave as the investors that own them do.
You’ll see on a stock chart that the behavior repeats over time. This is why we look for indicators like support and resistance levels, Bollinger bands, MACD sentiment, and seasonality. Is there a platform that lets you see all of these? Absolutely.
Tradingview is one of the most popular and widely used charting platforms in the investing community. Why? Well, first of all, the charting technology is top-notch and easy to use. Charts are clear, the user interface is extremely intuitive, and the app is web-based but also comes with a stellar mobile app.
Second, it’s free! Well, for the most part anyway. Tradingview comes as a completely free web-based software, but also has several premium levels for paid users. If you’re just starting out, the free version should be more than enough. The main difference aside from the number of alerts and layouts is that there are ads you need to close in the free version.
If you’re on the fence about signing up for the premium version of Tradingview, the site does offer a 30-day free trial. This is substantial, given one of its main competitors TrendSpider only provides a 7-day free trial. Tradingview provides full charts for all U.S. traded stocks.
As well as some international markets, commodities, foreign exchange, and even cryptocurrencies. It also comes with a stock screener, customizable alerts, a paper trading simulation, and even trading courses. Overall, whether you subscribe or not, Tradingview is one of the best overall charting platforms available on the internet.
What’s Trending in the Markets: StockTwits
We all saw the power of social media during the Reddit short squeeze events earlier this year. Millions of retail investors took to Wall Street and initiated a coordinated squeeze of GameStop and AMC stocks.
All this because a group of investors were sitting around in the same chat room together on Reddit. We have seen just as much influence from traders on FinTwit, Discord, and Facebook too. Social media is a powerful tool and one you can use to your advantage when day trading.
Stocktwits is a well-known financial social media platform that allows traders to share ideas in real-time. It has a very similar look and feel to Twitter’s platform.
If you already have a FinTwit account you’ll feel right at home. It does act more like a discussion board, rather than a channel or feed though. The difference being you can interact with everyone that is looking at the same stock.
In fact, Stocktwits had over 2 million users, which definitely gives more opportunity for conversation than FinTwit. Twitter can often seem cliquish and exclusive, so Stocktwits provides a nice middle ground.
What’s more, Twitter and Discord can be subject to pump and dump schemes. Stocktwits on the other hand is a part of FINRA and SIPC. So the sites are monitored. This is especially true after the SEC finally looked into Reddit forums and other social media outlets following the short squeeze events. Ironically, a few years back Stocktwits developed a program integration with controversial trading platform Robinhood. This was the app that was at the center of the whole short squeeze shenanigans in the first place.
Social Media
You can reply on any stock board or you can even join individual chat rooms which are hosted on the site. Note that some chat rooms are free but most are only available to premium users. Stocktwits also introduced its Heat Map technology. This shows exactly which sectors are hot and which are cold for the day. Stocktwits even comes with some basic stock charts and fundamental information for the companies. I’d recommend having both Tradingview and Stocktwits open though, as the two apps work well together.
The main issue with a site like Stocktwits and FinTwit or Reddit for that matter is credibility. You just never know if you can believe what a user is saying. Like Twitter, Stocktwits does allow you to see which users have more followers. This is a general indication that people already follow that user’s posts and legitimizes what they say a bit more. Still, you should only use Stocktwits to read sentiment and see what other traders are saying. Do your own due diligence when it comes to making actual trades!
Finding the Right Trading Platform: WeBull
In this age of digital finance and investing, you simply must choose a trading platform with low or zero fees. WeBull is definitely a newer platform that works best from your mobile phone. Not that it doesn’t have a desktop or web app, it does.
But you can tell that like Robinhood, WeBull is attempting to target the younger generation of traders. WeBull has only been around since 2017, but it has quickly become one of the more popular trading platforms for retail investors.
Where WeBull thrives is in high-volume trading and options trading. These are two popular ways in which people can day trade so that is why we suggested WeBull as the platform to use. There is not much of a focus on long-term investing, although WeBull did introduce its first retirement account to its users in 2019. This year, WeBull introduced the ability to trade cryptocurrencies for its users, as well as fractional share investing.
Luckily for new day traders, WeBull does not require a minimum account balance and offers $0 stock and options trades. There is no annual or inactivity fee either, which is also a nice touch. While in the beginning, it was mostly just stock trading, WeBull has brought in ETFs, Index Funds, Options, and even ADRs from international markets.
All three of its platforms are fast and user-friendly, but most importantly they are reliable. The minimalist look and feel of its web-based platform transfers over well to the mobile app. The nice thing about WeBull is that it places an emphasis on simplifying the ability to trade. This is why WeBull is universally acknowledged by both beginner and experienced traders alike. It even offers a bonus of two shares of stock if you sign up and add in money to your account!
Conclusion
If you want to become a profitable day trader, you have to have the best available software to help you. These are the best day trading apps for beginners. The markets don’t slow down and wait for anyone. So having the right setup will give you an advantage over others. Charting is crucial for short-term trading, and Tradingview provides one of the best free platforms around.
How do you get ideas for what to trade? Reading market sentiment and finding out what is trending is easy on Twitter. But it’s easier on Stocktwits since the entire platform is dedicated to traders and investors. Finally, finding the right trading platform to execute your trades is just as important.
WeBull offers free stock and options trading with no minimum balance or inactivity fees. The mobile app is incredibly easy to use, which allows you to trade no matter where you might be. All three of these apps are free and can make a huge difference in your success as a day trader.