Education is extremely important in trading, my friend is doing it now and I remember that he started to make his first profit only when he took the training seriously.
Start by reading up on papers around things you want to trade. For example, if you want to be a day trader, should do some paper searches along the lines of "intraday momentum" or "intraday price reversals" and see what researchers have put together. You can then replicate their process and try to find something novel. Once you find something novel, you then need to build a workflow that helps you utilize it to generate pnl. This is harder than it sounds... there are lots of decent alpha sources out there, but being able to use them is challenging for a variety of reasons (you may not have analytical tools, data limitations, etc.).
Thanks for the pointers @longandshort, that's much appreciated. I started the "learning path" as highlighted in the first posts BTW. Thanks for starting this thread up back then. I don't yet know what I want to trade really. There's so many options out there. This causes analysis paralysis in me. What I can trade so far - due to restrictions imposed by my current employer - are UCITS ETFs and forex (spot). So I'm going with that for now. Ironically this kinda helps me out with the analysis paralysis as it narrows down the huge list of things I could pick to trade. I must say I feel quite limited and tend to "feel the itching", meaning that I would prefer to go for stocks directly. On the topic of "what I want to be" - day trader vs something else - I also currently couldn't be a day trader due to having a full-time job. But then I'm not sure I would want to be. I am an IT professional and tend to want to automate stuff to free myself. So given the career shift (lifestyle?) I'm gradually putting on myself..perhaps I would be something else. Certainly the research aspect and more broadly being able to acquire skills and knowledge, that's something I enjoy doing. So yeah, let's see
Sounds like you can trade an FX and basic (index) equity global macro strategy using regional UCITS. I'd look into: real rate differentials, the determinants of exchange rates (note: it's somewhat diff between DM and EM), aggregate earnings surprise and the impact on equity indices. Macro variables tend to persist for 1-3 months, but you should test any strategy for a range of time horizons.