Day trading for a living

Securities trading on the basis of daily volatility is called 'day trading'. Depending on current market conditions, day trading is an excellent way to make money in the short time cycles. Two techniques are critical to day trading - reading market signals and triggering events, and using leverage.
Market signals and triggers are the key bits of information that you need to day trade for a living; they're indicators that it's time to buy or sell an equity, stock or bond position. When the markets are volatile (prone to sharp, short time rises and falls in prices), you can, by careful reads on the market, buy low, sell high, or use reverse or short selling strategies.
Day trading revolves around the speed of the transaction; this is one reason why most trading action is handled over the internet and via computer program. It's simply not possible to make a human to human trade over the phone rapidly enough to handle the volatility of the market on a trading strategy - not when the time from the triggering event to the buy (or more likely sell) order can be measured in a fraction of a second.
Day trading relies on making market bets and betting that your judgment as a trader is faster and sharper than the market aggregation; it also relies on knowing the ins and outs of whatever commodity you're trading, whether it's foreign exchange currency pairs, stocks, bond funds or mutual funds. This requires intense study and gearing yourself up for absorbing and acting on large volumes of data in a very short span of time. Bluntly speaking, it's not for sissies.
The other tool used for stock trading is a financial instrument called leverage. In a nutshell, leverage is taking out a short term loan from a lender, using it to buy stocks, selling them (or handling the short position), and paying back the loan at the end of the day out of the profits made on the sale.
When it works correctly, leverage allows you to multiply the size of your trades (and thus the size of your profits) considerably. When handled poorly, it can turn a minor trade that loses money into a major loss, so use it judiciously as a tool.
While we've mentioned programs that allow automation of day trading, be aware that day trading is, above all else, a job. If you're going to make a living doing day trading, you'll need to attend to it like a job...
If you're looking for a way to supplement your income, why not try your hand in the stock market?
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