Only make winning trades Seriously....cut your losers early and don't break your rules. Best of luck. Volume
Become acquainted with technical analysis or, at the very least, get comfortable with reading the chart of a stock or index in various timeframes ( intraday, daily, weekly...) to know whether that stock or index is at a high, low, trending or consolidating.
Actually, don't trade until you can consistantly make money paper trading in a non subjective manner.
Do it your own way. And I suggest look into Futures and Single Stock Futures rather than stocks and options. Don't worry too much about what anybody else says, and don't worry about watching news reports, news isn't as good of an indicator of what stocks will do as we usually start out thinking it should be.