"Prepare Your Trading Plan "You got to be very careful if you don't know where you are going, because you might not get there." -- Nicholas Nassim Taleb in The Black Swan Based on your temperament and your trading capital, you must lay out a trading plan. Now, what is a trading plan? The plan defines what you will trade, how you will trade, how and when you will enter or exit, etc. Thus, your trading plan would include some parameters on what kind of moves stocks have to make on price, volume and momentum to get you interested. Also, you must define if you are going to have a list of high liquidity stocks or whether you would go for stocks that start to move suddenly, and so on."