Generally people think being a trader means buying and selling the same day, or maybe overnight, but that's too narrow a view of things. Being a trader means figuring out where a bottom is and buying there, and then figuring out where a top is, and selling there. And, if you sell and the price keeps going up, you blew your trade. Sure, you could say, "I made some money", but there was no reason to sell. If, on the other hand, you sell and the stock goes down, 50%, 75%, and you can buy your shares back for a lot less than you sold them for, then there was a reason to sell.
Sometimes being a trader means waiting. You don't actually know what's going to happen, but the odds might be high eventually prices will go up, and then there might be some chance prices will go up right away ... and some chance prices will go down. You have to sort of weigh it all out, and you aren't going to come up with a number that tells you what to do, it'll be more like a feeling.
You can even look for stocks that will go up, you think, for a couple of years, or even decades. There's no fixed time frame. What makes you a trader is you will say something like, "this stock is going to go up 100 times in a few years." People will say "yeah, you can predict that", but you're a trader, and you just did, and you are willing to wait a few years to find out if you are right.
But, as a trader, you might also see stocks that you think are going to go up, say, ten times, in a few days. They'll be barely traded at all, but you will probably be able to buy a hundred shares, for a hundred dollars, and then sell them a few days later for ten times that. You might be wrong and loose a hundred dollars, or, you might win nine hundred dollars. That's trading.
The way you find these opportunities - all different types - is by following stocks, and the more stocks you follow, the more opportunities you are likely to find. The way you can find these opportunities is by looking at charts. Looking at charts makes you a trader. You might look at a chart for stock xxx every day for a year, and maybe on day 365 you will think it's a buy. Also, you might look, on any given day, at 100 charts, each for a different stock, and find some number that might be buys, and others that might soon be buys, and maybe something that just is a buy.
Looking at charts is an art. To look at lots of charts in a day, and follow lots of stocks by looking at their charts every day, you need a technique. Otherwise you will just get confused.
