I tend to trade the post-open periods far less frequently than when I first started day trading. Now, my goals are to start premarket preparation at about 8:45 a.m. and be finished trading by 10:00 a.m. EST. With $20,000 capital, I would look to get between $500 and $1000 per day when I win, and to keep losses minimal, less than $200, when I don't. Trading the market open period gives plenty of opportunity to make between $50,000 and $100,000 per year.

The reason I trade less frequently during the **post-open periods* is that I am not as motivated to do so any more. The gains are harder to come by and slower to materialize. Certainly it is possible to add to your daily profits by trading post-open periods. You need a very high tolerance for stress. If you are driven and highly motivated to make the most of every opportunity, you may be able to keep the discipline necessary for trading throughout the day. It is no longer a desire of mine but we will discuss it anyway.

Trading the post-open periods requires as much discipline as trading the market open, but it is discipline of a different kind. Here, you are looking for sustainable trends. The discipline you need is to not enter a trend when it is reaching a peak in the zigzag upward motion but to wait until the price has pulled back to the trendline. Should the stock take off and not return to the trendline for the rest of the day, you have missed that opportunity, so just move on. It is rarely wise to chase a security once it has lifted away from its trendline. Trading securities in the postopen requires you to analyze the overall market, choose a sector to operate in, and then find an individual security to trade. The concept is that you look for a sector that is heading in the same direction as the overall market, preferably the sector that is driving the market at that time. Then, within that sector, you look for the securities that are driving the sector. For upward-moving sectors, that will be the strongest stocks making the greatest percentage gains. For declining sectors, the weakest are driving the decline. Clearly, this is a different type of analysis than that used for the market open, and it will yield a different set of securities to trade. For each of these cases, your goal is to enter on a pullback within the trend and exit when the trend is still moving in your favor.

For the post-open period, you can either choose to move sectors as the market shifts, or you can stick with one sector and follow its oscillations and changing leadership. In either case, what you are doing is putting together a plan for how you expect a small basket of securities to behave. This is the only similarity between trading the open and the post-open periods. For both periods, you must have your basket of securities and an expectation for how you anticipate them to behave. Of course, not all the securities will behave as you expect, but you only have to trade the ones that do, and it requires discipline to stick to that.