Read "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" (Lefevre), "Market Wizards" and "New Market Wizards" (Jack Schwager), "Inside the House of Money" (Drobny), and "Alchemy of Finance" (Soros). Nassim Taleb's books (Dynamic Hedging, Fooled by Randomness, and The Black Swan) are also good for risk-management philosophy. Then read as much as you can about trader and fund blowups, until you become paranoid about risk. Once you are at that point, you are ready to trade and stand a decent chance of never blowing up. If you start trading before totally immersing yourself in the philosophy of risk control, discipline, and paranoia of blowups, then you are *very* likely to lose all your money or come very close to it. In between reading, each day watch price action across every futures market, every major global stock index, major world bond rates & yield curves and every major stock in the S&P 500. That's about 750 markets to follow each day, it only takes about 20-30 mins before or after the market close (ft.com or bloomberg.com or reuters.com for free delayed data). If you don't do that, you are lazy and won't get a real feel for the market, and so you probably won't ever make it. Also, follow any "hot" stocks & sectors that are in the news, either for bullish or bearish reasons. Watch how stocks react to earnings & news. Once you have absorbed the lessons of risk control and rational paranoia of losses, and once you have got say 1-2 years of price action experience, you should start to have noticed at least one pattern. I.e. when X happens, price usually (but not always) does Y. Formulate a trading strategy and trading plan to take advantage of this pattern, backtest it if possible, then start trading it with minimum size (i.e. 1 lots in futures, or a tiny amount of shares). The goal is not to make $$$ but to gain experience without risking much. Do this for the next 6-12 months. Do not increase your size until you are up 50% or more. Then you can increase size along with your account balance. The #1 mistake most traders make is to focus on how much they can make on a trade. Instead, you should focus on how much you can lose. Before entering a trade, always assume the trade will be a loser, and work out how much you'd lose. If it's too much for you to be happy to lose, then you are trading too much size, or taking an inferior trade. Try to risk 1% or less per trade. That might sound small, but when you make every mistake in the book, which you will, you will be grateful and wish you had only risked 0.1%. But if any noob is told risk 0.1%, he will just laugh and ignore that advice. So stick to 1%. If you ever lose 20% of your initial capital, stop trading for 1 month and do some research. If you follow this rule it will stop you blowing up by going on tilt, which is what most noobs (and many more experienced guys) do.