Introduction

Call me old fashioned (or just old) but every time I see a day trader trading on his phone, my blood pressure goes up a notch.

In this day and age, everybody has a phone and placing buy and sell orders has never been easier. The internet speed on the phone is really good and every broker has an app that can do everything that the website could do.  One can even make a case that trading from the phone is far superior to trading from a desktop or laptop.

So, why am I against this awesome technological advancement?

Understand the Nuances of Intraday

For answering the question we have to first understand the nuances of intraday trading.

Intraday trading is like standing in the middle of a noisy crowd and trying to make sense of what they are saying. You can not just be listening to one or two of them. You have to figure out a way to filter out the noise and focus on the meat- the body language of the market.

When I am trading, I have four 32” monitors right in front of me, none of which give redundant information.

I have to stay on top of :

1. NIFTY and BANK NIFTY charts
2. How Asian and later European markets are doing (not to mention the Dow futures)
3. How each cluster/sector is performing- which ones are the strongest and which one the weakest
4. How the stocks in my watch list (which I prepare the night before) are performing
5. Heat map of the market
6. And of course, the trading terminal

All this information has to be assessed in real-time and none of that is optional.

Problem Trading with a Phone 

So, what happens when you are trading from a phone?

You have ONE screen! Just one screen. Now, how can a trader stay on top of all the cues and signals that I have listed above is out of my imagination?

What ends up happening is that traders have a list of stocks in their watch list and they don’t look (or bother looking) at stocks where the real action is. Even when they do, they don’t have a good sense of whether the overall market/cluster is supporting the trade or if position size can be increased or decreased based on the cues.

The phone is Okay for Positional Trading

I don’t have any objection to using the phone for positional trades (and even to certain extent swing trades). The main objective is to take a trade based on some predefined strategy and the intraday price variations are generally not that significant. Since you don’t need to monitor all the cues and signals as in intraday, phones can be a convenient way of placing orders.

My Advice

Intraday trading is an entirely different beast. Don’t try to tame the beast the same way you would tame a sheep (the sheep being positional trading).

You need the best tools and technology to stay on top of the market and trading by phone is not the way to do that. Invest in a good configuration laptop or desktop.

Trade like you mean it.