How to Find Stocks to Day Trade (A Beginner Routine)

Short answer: look for stocks that are in play: moving more than usual, on more volume than usual, for a real reason like earnings or news. Find them each morning with a free screener, keep three to five on a short watchlist, and favor the ones that are stronger than the market.

I trade MNQ futures, so my "stock" is the Nasdaq 100 itself. But plenty of people learn on stocks, and the routine for finding them is simple once you've done it a few times.

What makes a stock worth day trading

• It's moving. A gap up or down from yesterday's close, or a big move since the open.
• It's busy. More shares trading than normal for this time of day (relative volume above 1).
• There's a reason. Earnings, a big upgrade or downgrade, company news. A move with no reason is a coin flip.
• It's liquid. Millions of shares a day and a price that isn't pennies, so your orders fill near the price you see.

A 15-minute morning routine

1. Check the market first. Look at SPY and QQQ. Up, down or flat? Everything else gets measured against them.
2. Run a screener. In TradingView (affiliate link), open the stock screener and filter for price above $10, average volume above 1 million shares, a pre-market move of 3% or more either way, and relative volume above 1.5. Full walkthrough: the TradingView stock screener for day trading.
3. Ask why each one is moving. Read the headline. Skip anything without a real reason.
4. Keep three to five. Add them to an "In play" section of your watchlist. See how to set up a TradingView watchlist.
5. Mark the levels. Yesterday's high and low, and the pre-market high and low. That's where the action usually is.
6. Watch which one is strongest after the open. The stock holding up best when the market dips is usually the one to focus on. That's relative strength.

What beginners should skip

• Penny stocks and tiny floats. The huge percentage moves are real; so are the wide spreads and halts.
• Stocks you found in a chat room. If you can't say why it's moving, you can't plan the trade.
• Twenty tickers at once. Three to five is plenty. One is fine.

Practice it on paper first

Run this routine every morning for a few weeks on a paper trading account before you trade a dollar. TradingView's paper account is free, and on the free plan US stock quotes come in real time from a Cboe feed. See how to paper trade.

Want the whole thing step by step? the Paper Route is my free course: lessons 5 to 7 cover watchlists, the screener and relative strength, then you trade 30 sessions on paper.

Education only, not investment advice. The stocks named here are examples, not recommendations. Most people who day trade lose money.