The process of devising an effective automated day trading strategy is relatively straightforward, but it is helpful to have some appreciation of the indicators you will use and how they work. Two or three indicators working together in a complementary fashion should be all that is necessary to produce a winning strategy, and additional ones may actually hurt more than they help as they tend to begin to get in each others' way with increased complexity. You also have to have a sense of how frequently you want your system to trade and how much loss you can tolerate when the trade goes south, which together will define the range of your indicator thresholds within which you will optimize. Using the same indicators, a strategy built on a 1 min chart may look quite different, will normally trade much more frequently, and will likely produce vastly different results than one built on a 5 min chart.
