I remember my first 2 trades really vividly. First one I had 100$ in my account and took a $20k position in silver CFD's and I got an email from my broker in the morning saying that my position has been closed due to lack of margin (got wiped out) My second trade was a stock named NII holdings, I picked it by pure randomness/chart had about 130 in my account I was levered 10x. I woke up the next day expecting another email saying my position had been closed due to lack of margin but apparently they got the rights to bring iPhones to Mexico and my investment soared. My account doubled and then I was determined to find out how the game worked before I lost anymore. It shouldn't take you years to get a grasp of trading, just absorb as much info as you can about the markets. In the beginning I watched old interviews with hedge fund managers, documentaries on the financial industry, read a bunch of trading books (story based/interviews not stats material), watched finance movies, fell asleep with bloomberg TV everynight. Good luck.
My beginning was all sheer terror now something like vast stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror
For some strange odd reason im really good at picking out stocks, pinpointing exactly what direction its going to go in. Unfortunately its never the stocks that im in lol
How much would say emotions play? Im mean getting into a stock and being almost confident seems like a really good advantage to have. For me whenever i buy a stock and feel iffy about afterwards the stock usually tumbles. but if i know that it was a right pick it goes up. strange huh?
I recently finished up a new study on trading psychology. You can read about it CLICK HERE. I think it will be helpful to you. Good luck and do not get discouraged, just stay small and learn from everything.
My experience says that as a new trader you first and foremost need to keep your trades very small and forget about making money but just focus on not losing them. To become a CONSISTENTLY profitable trader you need time, time to understand how the market you trade works, time to figure out how to have a high rate of good entries (7 to 3 at least), time to figure out how much you may expect to extract from a trade with good entry. Once you have done that you are ready to scale up and start making money. Scale up before and you will most likely loose your account. As far as I know almost all successful traders have not followed this path and lost their account at least once (more likely 2 or 3 times) before going back to the basics and LEARN trading without risking a wipe out. I certainly did so (lost my account 2 times, but will never let it happen again!!!). Now I am trading with some consistence but I am not making any significant amount of money (trading 2 contracts) as I want to further improve my trading before scaling up. Once my consistency will be proven for a few more months I will be ready to scale up and make good money. I have been trading day in day out for 1.5 years and it is not nearly enough to learn the business... P.S. Emotions get in the way of trading because traders do not know what they are doing, once you have gained the experience an a proven method, you do not get scared or greedy any longer as you know exactly that you will do what need to be done!
To continue KDA's concept... here is something I put in your previous thread about "Who is your fav trader to follow?": ................... "If you are a beginner... Go to the general "forums" page near the upper left hand corner of this page. Once you are in "forums", then do a search (on the upper right hand side) though the forums for the member "Lajax" and look at his sequential threads on NQ-price action (with a thread for each of the below steps). You will see a process of learning from observing <--> back testing <--> forward testing <--> sim trading <--> live trading. And going back and forth as necessary until your stats carry across. You don't have to follow DB Phoenix (as Lajax did) to use this process. Whoever you follow, working a process like this... is what being a trader actually is. And since you have to work out your own way to trade regardless, IMO the process is as much or more important than who you follow." ............... CC, one of the points from the above is noticing how much thought and experience Lajax put into learning to trade, before even attempting to be a professional trader. And most everyone is saying this process never ends; it continues throughout your trading career. A relative asked me to teach them how to trade this summer. I basically made a curriculum for them to go back and repeat what Lajax did... day by day, and compare their results to his. In fact, I stopped trading for a few weeks and did that myself as part of writing up the curriculum. It was a good exercise and I saw some places where I had skipped parts of the process and putting them back into my process has made a difference. In learning the process, or working it once you have it, the adage is true: “The faster you go the longer it takes.” Do it right. Don’t cut corners. For all of Lajax’s work… it is possible that he took to many trades to fast (overtraded) in order to get to his 100 trade goal for his statistics. At least, that is the temptation I discovered in myself. And I think DB said something about that to Lajax at the end (in different words). Taking the time to do it right is not easy. Besides “the process” you need to realize what trading is… but I think you come to that thru the process together with many of the questions you have been asking. You are asking some good questions. All the best to you.