"You are as good as your last trade... it's what you don't lose that determines how much money is left on your account" It reminds me that trading cannot be learnt it can only be done properly
There is no definite time in my view. I think learning is a continuous process. The biggest mistake one can think of is when one started feeling like he knows everything. The same goes in trading. You will keep on learning the new things. But yes, one can at least tell you the time you would take to get a hold of this. Although it depends person to person. I've heard that generally people takes at least 5-6 years to hold that position of being profitable.
To become a professional player you'll need training and special technical skills. All beginners who strive for success, just need to be trained! There are several options for training today - training in trading at a specialized university, which is accompanied by the spending of a very large sum of money or using as a training service specialized sites, where all training is offered totally free. It should be noted that professionals in this matter have diametrically opposed views. Some believe that the investment activity is such a complicated process that one can't do without education in a specialized educational institution! Others appeal to the fact that one can do with the basic set of knowledge! Undoubtedly, both camps of professionals are right, but for online players is certainly more suitable free training. In this variant of obtaining knowledge in financial trading, the first thing a beginner should do is to choose the most effective educational system, which can reduce the training time and provide the maximum amount of practical trading skills and theoretical information on trading. In principle, this set of services is quite enough to understand the principles of working in the financial market. Theoretical training will take you up to 2 months - this is taking into account the constant practical application of the acquired knowledge on the demo. Thus, you can get the training and initial trading skills relatively quickly! But this is just the beginning of training, and the rest takes an individual amount of time for each trader.
Turtles experiment is a great example. A group of people, which was selected out of the 4 000 candidates, all were taught in the same way and the same principles, for the same system. Still, results differentiated a lot. Some were loosing, some did well. One went paranoid. Now, same goal, and instead of 4 000, you have 400 000 or maybe even 4 000 000 globally, who tries, to beat this game. Imagine how much the results will vary. You can drop an average time frame, of 2 - 3 years let's say, but again, people are just to different, mentally, emotionally and based on the work ethic. Even the goals are different, thus the motivation, so called ,,Drive'', will be on a different scale. Some, joins the Arena, for the side income (whatever that is) & few are here, - for the kill. My advice - outwork them.
The learning process and time is different for everybody. So it totally depends on how much you are willing to explore and learn.
Any of you Futures sp500 traders come across this site? If so - what is your opinion of it as a learning source?
If you actually stick to a single, 100% objective and profitable strategy, without resorting to emotion or trying to outsmart markets, pretty quickly I'd say. Some weeks, maybe a month. The thing is that you'll very rarely come across these, or be able to execute them properly, which means you'll have to take the time to learn, create and execute them. Now, that takes a hell of a long time, depending on how many times you get misdirected or give in to overthinking, passions, etc. For me, it took me about 1.5 years of near full time study and research to develop a stable system. That involved a lot, a lot, of filtering bad advice, erroneous thinking and etc. I've been forward testing it on demo account for about 2 months after that, to some good results. The best advice I can give on learning is looking for someone who actually makes money like this (beware of internet gurus) and learning from them. Second to that is learning what can be achieved in this business, because a lot of people get stuck because they can't accept that you will not generate massive returns from this. You sure as hell should not try to beat market returns, for instance. That is dumb, seeing that usual benchmarks such as the S&P are built with a long-term perspective in mind, which you will absolutely not beat by doing a bunch of short term trading. You will, however, be able to take advantage from a much lower maturity rate, which means you can generate income - which is precisely why you should align your expectations to produce more or less the same as an income-producing instrument.
The best way to evaluate a trader's quality is to backtest the trades that they took. If this guy is indeed "live day trading", just register his results over a period of say a month (which is easy if the past vids are available, a bit more if not) and see how much you would've made in that period. Then take another month and another to see how consistent he is. Or just learn one of his setups and backtest it. EDIT: also, make sure if he's not omitting losing trades to make himself look better.