i learned more from using a piece of graphing paper and a pencil then from some of these so-called "teachers". if you are a keen observer and can train yourself to be decisive and disciplined, along with having a business sense/experience, all that you would need at that point is the ability to properly understand and apply data. in short, if you are a type A individual/personality you can attain great success in trading markets with the proper regiment/plan. on the other hand if you just get by in life and do the bare minimum then your success is directly tied to your ability to change your ways. in that case, you would NEED a mentor or coach. in summation, both work and have advantages but it is up to you to decide who and what you are and act accordingly. hope it helps... alex
Self 'taught' by trial and ERROR. A mentor would be great, but picking a methodology is almost like picking a major at college...a great professor is awesome but what if its in basketweaving and you wanna major in underwater basketweaving? I think i had one slight advantage....I came into the game w/ no knowledge whatsoever. A clean slate. I had no hangups about what buying stocks/securities should be about...cause i knew nothing of them.
About the 'prop houses' you' re all talking about, is it easy to get in ? What do theu require as experience or diploma ?
== That sounds about right for an average; Marty Schwartz took about 10 years. Jack Schwager top trader books help much; charts help some, trading and trading records [yours] help some, keeping exspenses low like cutting losses according to plan helps some, read much on elitetrader helps some. Hope this helps.
Watch hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of charts. Remember, trading is for some people and not for others. Only you know this for yourself. It may not be easy to identify this either. On the topic of learning from others: Yes you can pick up things from others. It will be a little here and a little there and in between the little here and there will be a lot of stuff that you'll need to filter out. Of course, you won't know that it needed to be filtered out until hinDsight is in view. In the end, you'll need to be able to make decisions on the charts for yourself so the hours of watching charts is the area to spend most of your time. IMHO.
2.5 to 3 years to begin to break even? Wow, are you kidding? You should be consistently profitable after about 6 months. If it takes you that long just to break even,You really should look for another career path or figure out what the hell you're doing wrong. Actually you're supposed to know what you did wrong and right every day and correct it. And some prop shops are difficult to get into. I've interviewed with most of the larger ones. Just make sure the training is tight and not one of those "sit next to the head trader" and hope you learn something type places.
Well, I believe you can't become a trader only 6 months after starting from scratch. How can you know you can live from trading after such a so short period ? if you start in a good period, you become too confident.