In my experience, it takes about 9-12 months to see any consistent profitability. Assuming you work very hard and dont blow through all your cap of course.
He didn't mention anything about losses.. "i read the news and basically buy when i think the stock is coming back up and sell when i have a nice profit. " My advice, stick with swing trading as you are currently doing and keep going strong with the bio degree. You're in college, you don't have time nor necessity for trading systems (that don't beat the market), an account at IB (overkill), trading FUTURES as someone suggested (crazy), don't step into any of that. I've been swing trading for several years doing almost exactly what you're doing now, just my approach involves a good deal of technical analysis. You're probably using one of the mainstream retail online brokers and that's 100% fine for what you're doing. Don't overtrade, don't daytrade, don't trade futures/options/FX, and don't bother with trading systems. All of the aforementioned are fine for exploring after copious research if you are planning to trade *full-time*. If that's your goal, then most of the advice over the past 4 pages is fine as well. If you want to keep swing trading while you continue on your bioengineering path, then just read & research all you can. Let your interest in trading remain like your interst in poker, don't lose focus, don't get carried away, and allow both to act as a compliment to your career path.
I say that because he's in college and just getting his feet wet trading equities. Derivatives are a whole other ballpark, opening up an IB account tomorrow and trading ES is not in his best interest with his experience.
"Mastering The Trade" by John F. Carter, he gives a good over-all view of trading, and gives quite a few set-ups and dozens of examples to give you some ideas to get started. Will be a good addition to all the other excellent books already mentioned. "Mean Markets and Lizard Brains" by Terry Burnham was also pretty good. It will try to help explain why almost everything you think about the markets is almost the exact opposite of what you really need to do to make money.
There's an excerpt from the book in the October 2005 issue of Active Trader magazine, you can download it (and a few others) from here: http://www.activetradermag.com/sampleissues.htm Regards, JJ
Hey, buy the book "If it doesn't go up, don't buy it" by Al Thomas. Look on amazon.com books A former chicago stock exchange broker. Tons of wisdom, and humurous. I personally loved the book as a newbie myself. Very easy to read, and thats what I was looking for to break in. Hope you like it!!