This 1000 times. 99% don't get it. You can be a mediocre doctor, lawyer, engineer and make a very nice comfortable living for decades. A mediocre trader will not even last 5 years.
My advice is take $10,000 of the money and just throw it out the window. Because if you are going to take $25k as a complete newbie in a trading account without study, sim, research, a plan, or idea how markets work, you are going to blow through that $10k pretty quickly. I figure I could save you some time and effort.
I would not necessarily do that. I'd take 500 bucks exchange that into Bitcoin and deposit it on Bitmex. Get a Sierrachart subscription for 30$/m so you have a halfway decent frontend and start trading with 500 contracts per clip. Takes 5 min to setup, zero paperwork There is no cheaper way of getting your feet wet and it is a market were you can have edge without any experience, because it's still a clown fiesta. Of course you'll have the full package. Serious server lags, shitty infrastructure, wash trades, exchange trading against their customers yada, yada, yada...but you know, all this shit happens in the "real" markets, too, it's just disguised. On the other hand there is money to be made, even with a small account. This market is in it's infancy so serious mispricings happen all the time. But the most important thing is that you'll be able to learn how a market actually works since there's zero crossflow from derivatives. After you've outgrown crypto as a directional trader (because you cannot trade bigger than 300k notional without spooking the market), you can move on to other market. But you've cut your learning curve by like 2-3 years. "But crypto is so manipulated and it's going to zero and it's a scam*insert heavy breathing*" You know what? Chances are at 99% that you will lose money as a noob, cause you don't know shit and you haven't seen shit. As long as you don't get carried away with all the shilling and marry your positions, it doesn't matter what you trade as long as you specialize and learn your market. But you can decide weither you want to make your first blow up 25k + 3months worth of software or 500$+3 months SierraChart.
Don't day trade. Don't trade live at all until you find THE EDGE. I mean the real edge, not "discretionary" BS. Then practice it on sim, then live small size until you are sure you have balls to execute properly (harder than seems). The simplest kind of an edge is waiting for a mature bear market ( > 1yo ), buying and holding for years. The rest is way more difficult.
How about buying deeps for the last 10 years? Trading such volatile instrument with small account and no regulations is suicide. By mispricing you must mean serious manipulations. If I can't contain the risk, I'm not interested in reward as it will lead you on the wrong path. I thought we were talking about execution quality which is liquidity dependant. So the smaller the size, the easier it is. Markets are very accessable and can be very forgiving at times, and that's the reason they attract so many new participants (like casinos) Doesn't usually happen to Surgeans
[QUOTE="qlai, post: 4766980, member: 494677" Trading such volatile instrument with small account and no regulations is suicide. By mispricing you must mean serious manipulations. If I can't contain the risk, I'm not interested in reward as it will lead you on the wrong path. [/QUOTE] If you can buy for 5 what is actually worth 10, does it matter weither the mispricing was due to manipulation or not? And trading such a volatile instrument with such a small account is exactly what you should do. Minimum ticksize is 0.0002 USD and there are no fixed fees, soI don't quite understand how that should be suicide. And it's a real order driven market, not thatCFD or bucketshop bullshit. But if you want to blow up your 5k account with the ES or bleed out paying 3.99 per ticket for your 300 share order, go ahead. Please note that 90% delete their account because if their own lack of competence, not because of counterparty risk. So when you can decide how expensive your first lessons are going to be and you overpay, I wonder why you want to be trading at all
CFerret very good way to go...the only thing is it's like watching paint dry. I am a gambler, risk taker, so I trade....I have 13 accounts and haven't blown one out yet! In fact they all produce income every month....all of them. I have them setup so they produce income each month even if the market is down big time. In the lastest little bump in the road 2008-2009 they all produced income just as they do today. Each account value was down deep in the Red but produce monthly income they did. That was a bear market and yes it was just the correct time to buy more of everything!