Then I suggest you read a LOT of trading books (I personally read more than 350 books over the years). And then test and test and re-test your trading ideas with historical data. Also, be warned that trading is VERY addictive and can seriously interfere with your medical studies.
Not a trading recommendation, but it I only had $500, that's not enough, so instead I would: + study the smart posts here for months, test strategies in sim account + buy 5 great trading books and hire a pretty temp to read them to me + hookers and blow for stress relief, lol jk Good luck!
With experience you will come to understand sustainable 40-50% growth is incredible and that the odds are stacked against most from doing it. You must believe you will beat the odds.
Buy and hold QQQ with half of your nest egg and don't worry if it tanks. It will go up in the long run. Don't touch it for at least the next 15 years. Add to it when you can, ESPECIALLY while you are young. And ESPECIALLY when the market is down. Like they said, buying a couple months ago would have given you a hell of a good leg up, but that's okay. Long run. That's where it's at. Don't touch it except to put more dough in. Live poor NOW. Don't buy a new car. Buy a beater for $1k or less and go minimum liability on the insurance, and drive carefully, watch out for the other guy. Take the car and insurance payments you would have made, and put at least half into your QQQ account every month. When the market is down, put all of it and eat beans and rice for a while. Serious. Live poor for the first 5 years of your adult life, I mean crazy destitute poor. Buy second hand clothes. They are hip, anyway. Dates? Find a rich GF or just do netflix and popcorn once a week before the ol' in-and-out. Charities? YOU BE the charity. Your investment fund, anyway. Don't wait until you are 50 to invest big just because you think you will have more disposable income to invest. It WON'T MATTER as much to invest more, then. Unless you are going to work until you are 85. Now I said invest half, in buy/hold QQQ. It's not the only option but it is a pretty good one. The other half, if you spend a year or so studying, you might want to swing trade or even day trade with it. Lots of brokerages have "paper accounts" and you can trade imaginary money using real time data. Even delayed data is okay but realtime data is real nice. Learn how to place orders, and when to bail. TBH nobody actually knows when to bail, but you can get an idea by studying strats and trying stuff out on your paper account. Trade paper for 6 months or so. One simple quick and dirty scheme is to trade TWO ETFs only... TQQQ and SQQQ. They are mirror images of each other. When one is going up, the other is going down. No need to short sell, just get out of one and in to the other. You can make up to three day trades in any five day period with a US broker. I suggest you ALWAYS limit yourself to two, keeping one in the pocket, so if you buy into a swing trade that starts looking jinky, you can bail and still not end up with that fourth day trade and get locked out under the PDT rule. While you are paper trading, you may as well put the rest of your dough temporarily in another fund. Don't let it just burn a hole in your pocket. Make a few bucks with it. Three day trades isn't a lot, but well, yeah it is a lot. You can do a lot with that. If you can CONSISTENTLY make 1% a day, keeping in mind that it is actually kinda hard to do it consistently, well let's see... $250 initial account, 1% is $2.50. When you put it that way, it's a pretty easy looking target, right? But such a small return! Have no fear. In about 70 trading days at 1% profit, you will double your stake to $500. In another 70 days you will have $1k. That's 140 days of trading at 1% gain per day. $2k at the end of 210 days. Say a year and a half. $4k, $8k, $16k, finally $32k, in 490 trading days. When you get to $25k you can play with the big kids and not worry about PDT. As your pot grows, reduce your risk. It is fine and dandy to go all in when you are only betting out with $1k, which after all you can quickly save from doing odd jobs. It is another thing to go all in with full margin when you are up to $10k, striking distance from the magic $25k figure. It would be heartbreaking to blow up your account then. With lower risk you make lower wins, typically. That's okay. Live and trade another day. Keep the losses small. But back to the TQQQ/SQQQ thing. Learn about indicators, especially EMA and Bollinger bands. Not cause they are the best indicator, but because they are pretty simple. What they both are, are moving averages. Oh, VWAP is good, too. Anyway take your basic Bollinger Band setup. With the timeframe on 9 bars and a top and bottom deviation of 2, you have a lot of things to think about when entering or exiting a play. First of all, look at the width of the bollinger bands. If they are tight against the middle line, you don't have a lot of volatility. When they are wide apart, things can get crazy. Crazy good or crazy bad. Look at the trend. Don't go long (buying stock) when the Bollinger is sloping downward unless you have some reason. Don't go short (selling stock you haven't bought yet) if it's going up. Now, is the stock price in the upper half, or the lower half? Is it staying there? You then have a trend on top of a trend. Do not for a minute think it is as simple as that. But just starting out paper trading, try working with the BB and trust the trend. When it crosses over, look out. You might want to bail. When the BB turns downward, REALLY think about bailing if you haven't already. Look at different time frames. One minute, five minute, 30 minute candles, all show you a different story. Hour or day candles. The more different time frames you have that agree with one another, the better the setup. When you see a huge spike in the price, it is too late. Don't jump in and chase the stock. Wait, let it consolidate, and catch it the next time it heads for the moon. If it did it once, twice, it will do it a third time, 9 times out of 10. With the TQQQ and SQQQ, the former is a leveraged index fund. What the market is doing, in theory TQQQ is doing triple. SQQQ is the same, but on the short side. If the market is headed for the bedrock, SQQQ will be standing proud. So when there is a lot of volatility, you can trade these, one at a time, and be ready to switch over or just bail. Learn to set stops so you can't tank your account with one bad trade. Limits, too, so you don't miss a great spike and reversal when you have to go tinkle or something. These two ETF's (Exchange Traded Funds) trade just like stocks and behave a lot like stocks, and it makes for a very black and white learning environment. Don't listen to your own "great ideas". I did that and if it had worked I would have a $200k account. Instead I lost $20k and took a year off of trading. Now I am back in with a small account and doing pretty good, just like I did like maybe 7 or 8 months after I first started the first time. GREAT IDEAS ARE DOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMM!!!!!!!! Make rules that are logical and have a proven track record, and stick to them. At the very least, you will make accidental money in a rising market. Bend the rules and lose. Thanks for bringing your money to the table!!! We appreciate it. Buy two or three good books on day trading and two or three on swing trading and one or two good ones on investing in general. Stick with equities. (stocks, etf's, etc) Don't mess with options or forex or stuff like that at first. Learn one thing at a time. Don't even think about joining a paid chat room or taking a paid course until you can quote chapter and verse from your books, and apply the system therein to your trading with discipline and precision. Honestly you don't get much out of online courses, and anyway you can get a lot of the same material on youtube, FWIW and put your BS filters on. If you are running Linux like us grownups, you can use youtube-dl to easily and painlessly DL your tubes and save to your hard drive. No need to spend $3k on books. Just get well reviewed books on Amazon, the top two or three. There are ways around the PDT rule, such as using an offshore brokerage, but I advise against it. US brokers are more tightly regulated and well, just safer and cheaper. As in zero commission, for most of the popular ones. If you want to go offshore, CMEG is well regarded. But commish eats up a lot of your profits, or adds to your losses, whatevah. Three trades a week gives you plenty to think about. Keep track! When you buy four different stocks in one day, your broker doesn't know if you are going to hold one, two, or three of them overnight. He will let you buy buy buy. But sell all four before the bell, and you are triggered, locked out of trading. You can get ONE reset every 180 days and go back to normal. Or you can sit in time-out corner for 90 days. But remember... 490 days at 1% and you in theory are up to $25k! By the time you have "traded up", you ought to know at least a little about trading. Luck can get you far, but not THAT far. If you are like 90% of new or wannabe US traders, you will blow up your account, or else give it up in time to salvage a little bit of it, in the first year. Don't be too down if that happens. Study, paper trade, and if you think you figured out where you went wrong, THINK about starting over. Don't just jump in there. Can you afford to lose it all? If the answer is yes, well maybe go for it. Do you like to gamble? Not gamble as in slot machine, gamble as in poker. In fact, poker is a lot like day trading. You bring your money to a table full of savvy and experienced even bloodthirsty guys who want it for themselves. Luck is good, no luck is bad, and you never know which it's gonna be. Skill will help you win, and not guarantee a winning session but give you a good probability of a winning career if your money management is strong. Learning the basic rules is a lot like learning about order types. Learning strategy is like learning, well, strategy. Learning money and risk management is probably the most important thing in both. I will say it again. Learning money and risk management is probably the most important thing in both. Do you play poker? Do you play well, even against strong players? Do you (stoopid question, right?) ENJOY it? maybe then, you would want to get back in the ring. If poker is scary to you, don't day trade. Just my suggestion.
Thank you so much dude, I really appreciate your article. So much juicy information. Not only me but whoever is reading this thread is going to get a lot of help from your article. Once again thank you.
Less help than you think. There is SO MUCH more. Whatever you do, spend some time, a LOT of time, studying, and practicing with a paper account before day or swing trading.