I wish you were right, but I don't have a good handle on it. I have a few stocks that I follow and quite familiar with, including this one, and I play with them with good enough degree of predictability; but even with those I screw up much more often than I like. I'm a somewhat advanced beginner, that's all. As such, I don't post my buys and sells, except for on boards like these.
The only thing I can recommend without misleading you (at least, it works for me so far, not sure about anyone else, so anyone feel free to jump in to correct me) is getting a handle on losses. Everybody makes fun of how quickly the daytraders jump out of the stock, but that's the thing - if you do it quickly, you can keep your losses to a minimum, and it's never too late to jump in again, if the situation changes. If you can't jump back in, well, then you didn't make money, but didn't lose it, either.
Averaging down isn't a good idea, in my opinion, as it doesn't add anything to your profit. If you jump out quickly and then buy it lower, you have the apparent realized loss (which you may avoid by averaging down), but that's just for the show. Your real loss is likely to be larger, as you held the losing position longer. Check your gains/losses on the whole trade afterwards, and you'll still see the loss for selling the position, it'll just be offset by gain. WHich will be the case anyway, if you jumped out and back in, only the loss will be smaller, and the gain the same, so you win by now averaging down. And if the stock doesn't come back up, you lose big if you average down. Especially if you trade using daytrader margin, in which case you might have to sell at a loss at the end of the day anyway to maintain that margin, if you're to have a go at it the day after.
A lot of people, especially on the boards, keep saying that if you aren't in when the MOMO has started, you won't win big. Well, you also won't lose, but also, if it's a major MOMO, you'll just jump in later by not averaging down. However, if the stock tanks, you also won't lose much, if anything.
Beyond that, well, my charting skills aren't good enough to give a good advice, and there're good boards teaching charting here on IHUB, books, etc. on the subject. Myself, I just learn a few stocks to exhaustion and deal with them. If there isn't a good play on any of them some day, well, I just stay on the sidelines.
As you can probably tell, those are hard-learned experiences. The trick is to keep the losses low, learn TA (wish I did before turning 30 :)), to follow your plan when you gain (if you leave tons of money on the table, too bad, but you made some profit still, and try to learn why you got out early, etc, rather than despairing that you got out too early. It is, however, important to exit when you decided to (or have to), and not when it "feels right". Emotions are your worst enemy), to not let your emotions run you either when you win, or when you lose. After all, we shouldn't be trading with the money we can't afford to lose, right? :)
Hmm, speaking of that, there was a good South Park on this, the one where the adults of South Park tried to raise money by gambling in an Indian casino in order to save their town from demolition. Very educational :)
Anyway, if you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer them to the point that I can (just like people on these boards did for me), but do keep in mind that I'm also a beginner.
