Hello, my name is Razvan, I am 20 years old and I am a college freshman pursuing a degree in Finance here in South Florida. I am very interested in starting a trading career when I am done with my degree but I also plan to get internships in my junior year which is why I want to learn as much as I can by then. My question is : What is the best path to take and learn the basics of day trading such as analysis, candle stick patterns and other terminology used on a regular basics. I want to do that for a month or so until I am comfortable and then start playing around with a demo account for a year and develop a system of my own which I can practice and try to follow on a daily basis. Please let me know what steps you took in your first years and what you think helped you the most. Any advice is greatly appreciated and if any of you are located in South Florida, I would love to meet you and talk in person. Once again, thank you and I look forward to your answers.
Hi Razvan, This is a cut and paste of what I told my nephew in real life and another guy on this board that was also looking to be a professional trader. It is from a post on another thread. The thread topic was "What's the difference between trader and portfolio manager?" but drifted into career advice. I will try to give you more direct advice in the next couple days but taking off on holiday Saturday so got to get the portfolio set up for auto pilot so a little busy today. The thread is here and there are several posts I hope you find informative and maybe valuable: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=164148&perpage=6&pagenumber=19 This is my general advice: I have a nephew just entering university in Canada who is interested in this business and asked me what subjects he should take to set himself up for the best shot. I told him take English because if you can write your ideas in a clear and concise manner regarding the themes in a novel you can easily knock off that business study on opportunities in the Far East or whatever. Second take Statistics and master it; donât just study it like you are looking for a pass. I canât stress this enough. Statistics is the one subject that is valuable in all cases no matter what you do with your life. Statistics is directly applicable to every thing from time series analysis for trading to running a fruit stand or a plumbing business or anything. Third take some logic (both mathematical and philosophy) which will tune you onto logical fallacies & tiger traps etc which will really help when it comes to evaluating your testing results to see what they actually are verses what you hope they will be. Finally do hardcore programming and that means not scripting languages like you find in retail trading system back testing packages but the real deal like C++etc. I am an old time fortran programmer from my physics days and such a skill has been far more valuable than anything else except for mathematical logic and statistics. If you can logically think in terms of algorithms when someone talks to you about a trading concept they have come up with it will give you a skill that makes you valuable to anyone running a hedge fund/CTA. It is great to be the creative genius but not everyone gets that gene switched on and if you are not one of those people but you can express the trading ideas of the creative genius in an algorithm that you can code and test you will never be without work. And that is Smokerâs guide to trading success in a nutshell! All the best in the future. Cheers Smoker PS the bottom line is over the last thirty or so years of my career trading has gone from standing on the Merc floor doing seat of the pants scalping to a very specialized mathematical & technical skill set which requires a lot of dedication to master. I work at one of the biggest pools of off shore capital in the world and we don't even look at anyone unless they have the above in spades. It is good you are still in school and can acquire the useful skills in an risk free academic environment. Best of luck!
I do not think that the bulk of "traders" beat the averages. Knowing this I would pursue a career with inherent value that will pay you an income that allows you to save more than you spend. Invest in a manner that will beat the bulk of the others, low cost mutual fund indexing. I expect that more people generate true wealth this way. I do not think you will follow this advice.
get an education in a field that will allow you to earn the money to support your trading. hopefully you understand that very few daytraders make it. and no you are not special.
How about get an education in a friend that will allow you to earn money - and become the master of that field.
if you want to get a feel for the markets to see if you are suited for the business, try the Combine=-- http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?threadid=250400
I'm sorry but what does this have to do with getting a feel for the business. 99% of the business, the front-office part of it, even the trading part of it, has little in common with this type of format.
<b>: What is the best path to take and learn the basics of day trading such as analysis, candle stick patterns and other terminology used on a regular basics. I want to do that for a month or so until I am comfortable and then start playing around with a demo account for a year and develop a system of my own which I can practice and try to follow on a daily basis</b> The question is about being a day trader. Not on the institutional side.
Thank you for understanding me. Also I thank the other people that replied. I do plan on taking challenging classes like statistics and so on, but on my free time I want to try and learn as much as I can about day trading so when internship day comes, I can be superior.