Disclaimer: I do not actually trade this way, this is an intellectual exercise of sorts.
A few years back, I read a free e-book that I came across that talked about a particular method of trading stocks. This method involved reading the "Analyst Upgrades/Downgrades" list every morning, right before the open of the market, and choosing one of the "Upgraded" stocks based on some of their underlying principles. The idea was to buy said stock at 9:30-10am, hold it until you make a net profit of 1% (after commission), and sell. Repeat as many days as you can.
The author then gave a telling picture of what compounding an initial investment of $10k would do to this money to sensationalize the whole thing.
As an exercise in boredom, I paper-traded for a few months after reading this, based on his principles. My faux-investments were up 50% in 3ish months. Then, life got in the way and I forgot about this.
Not too long ago, I wanted to learn the programming language PHP. I used my trading example as a way to learn HTML page-scraping (get stock quote info and analyze it for the fundamentals) and PHP-MySQL interaction (send info to a database I have, and keep track of my faux portfolio). I didn't get that far, because we just had a baby in April and my free time is pretty minimal.
TL;DR What I'm getting at is: Do any of you "day trade" to any degree? Is this method of riding a small wave of enthusiasm for a stock, for a small gain, an actual thing? The e-book never talked about an "out" strategy, as in how low it would have to go to get out. I always thought if I tracked the market with my little PHP program for long enough, I could devise the best upside/downside parameters and give it a go (ie Sell at +1.5% or -2.5%).
I'm thinking of finishing my little PHP tracking program.