Sorry I didn't reply yesterday, my inbox blew up and since I had already viewed your comment it wasn't in red and I forgot.
You strategy will vary depending on what you are trading.
If you are trading stocks I would use indicators like MACD, RSI or any other indicators you find helpful. This is what banks/investment companies do. This will help minimize loss.
If you are trading crypto currencies these indicators can give you false info. They can still be used but they aren't as effective as if you are trading stocks.
At the end of the day the basic principle is the same. You aren't going to get a big gain off one trade but you make lots of small trades that add up to big wins. In my case I trade Litecoins on a Chinese exchange. I use this exchange because it offers zero trading fees. They have 2 exchanges which trade in USD and CNY. They only offer no fees on the exchange that trades in Yuan(CNY). This makes it kind of a pain in the ass to convert but if you google "1000cny usd" it will give you the correct amount in USD.
I try and maximize the number of trades and not the amount of gains on each trade. Because of this I have it set up to buy at whatever price and then add .01 to the price and try and sell. One thing to keep in mind is that the price will (For the most part) not travel in a straight line. It won't go from 10 to 10.10 unless it was a huge order. As the price starts to rise it will go to 10.01, 10.02,10.03, back down to 10.02, up to 10.03,10.04,10.05, back down to 10.03 and so on. Every time the price moves I should be closing a trade since what I am doing is basically covering all the price points hence the "dumb down" version of trading. If I was trading stocks I would use indicators but they don't work as well on Cryptos. Also, if you use an exchange that charges fees because you don't trust an oversees exchange(Which can be risky) you have to take that into account when deciding on you gain per trade.
One thing to keep in mind is that you have to set a range on what you will trade in. You don't want to have the price spike and tie a bunch of your money up which forces you to decide if you want to wait it out or take a loss.
Right now might not be a good time to put money in anything since the stock market is being rattled by china's bad market and bitcoin is having block size issues. Litecoin doesn't have the same issues but I think we are going to still see a drop in the price of Litecoin over the next few weeks maybe months. That being said, now if the perfect time to start reading about HFT and start programming something that gets prices so you can get used to trading APIs. Hopefully by the time you have something up and running the price will stabilize and the drama will be over.
I woke up about 30 min ago so my mind is still kinda foggy. If you want me to explain something in more depth let me know.
DISCLAIMER:It is possible to loose money, This is investing which is why once you get it set up you don't have to spend very much time every day doing anything. If you want something more stable you should try something else. That being said I have heard of people getting their perk rewards (or any other beermoney site) getting cancelled because the site thinks you did something funny. The only safe way to earn money is getting a job.