Lately I’ve become very involved with day trading. It something that I’ve thought about since I was in high school. The idea of analyzing data and making decisions based off of it now comes natural based on my experience in data management, but it hasn’t always been that way.
When I was in high school I had a friend who’s parents encouraged him to put his barmitzvah money into the stock market. It just so happened he picked ‘Cisco’ as his investment when they were on their way to becoming a gigantic tech company, so my friend made a ton of money. He promptly spent that money on a new BMW. A high schooler driving around a new convertible BMW – now that is the epitime of cool! Ever since then I’ve been enamored with the idea of betting big in the stock marketing and winning (more details on that story here).
Now that I’ve grown a little older, I realized that what my friend did was pure luck (or he got a good stock tip from his dad). In the stock market their are winners and losers, and the people who tend to win typically have the most complete and accurate data and research.
I’ve been looking at Online Trading Academy reviews for a while now because learning the proper way to trade is critical to being a successful day trader. It is so much more than hearing about a stock you like and buying some shares. A good day traders analyzes data and trends the majority of their time, so the better you are at this, the more successful you can be with day trading.
All of this got me thinking, what is the Master Data for a day trader? While the Master Data Management discipline typically applies to corporations, I think the sentiment can be applied to a day trader whose livelyhood depends on the analysis of good data.
In my mind, a day trader’s master data is simply: Stock Prices (historical and current/realtime), Earnings Announcements, and other analysis ratios (such as P/E). I tend to keep the scope of Master Data very simple, because its very easy for it to spiral out of control and encompass anything… sort of its own version of ‘scope creep’.
What would you consider to be the master data for a day trader? Can you think of other jobs where the traditional sense of master data doesn’t apply, but the sentiment does?


