From time to time the word day trading comes up, and that it is an easy way to make huge amounts of money in a short time by flipping stocks.

To be able to do day trading professionally it requires tapping into the inefficiency of the stock market. In the academic world of economics there is the debate over whether the stock market is efficient, that every stock is priced correctly at any time based on supply and demand driven by the flow of information about the general market combined with the company specific news.

Common Day trading strategies
A common approach in day trading is to do arbitrage trading - two stocks or indices are suppose to go in the same directions because of factors such as being in the same sector or planned mergers, when they do diverge one take positions that will give a profit when the gap between the prices closes. The price difference is usually very small so the trading has to be leveraged with a lot of margin.

Pro and Con
The pro with day trading is that it is possible to make money no matter the direction of the market.

The con is that it will take a lot of work, since you have to follow the market every day. With a long term investor, he can just forget about the market and ride the long term bull.

Of course it is not free money, it is not as easy as it seems. There are risks involved, the possibilities for loss great since the use of margin.