One of the most important jobs as a day trader is to control your risk exposure. Sure, controlling risk is a concept you must use in any type of trading, however in day trading you must look at this issue from a different angle. Since your job is to capture various price swings during the day naturally your profit objectives will be much smaller than that of a swing trader (who places a single trade aiming for a much larger profit objective). So, when placing several trades during the day it can be easy to “drift” away from your pre-determined stop loses. A common (very common actually!) day traders thought is “if I extend my stop loss just a bit I hope the market will turn around”! Hope is one of the trader’s biggest enemies. These little extensions of stop losses add up and suddenly without noticing you are losing more dollars per trade than planed making your risk/reward ratio turn against you.The day trader’s job is to capture intraday price swings. Depending on the system or trading method employed, this can mean capturing one intraday swing or various intraday swings. The general job of a day trader is (then we will go over the more specific job of the forex day trader):