=================== Hi-FiGrad; Its easy money sometimes; but actually takes much hard but fun work.And its takes many people years to be profitable. Chicago 20 years+ trader William Eng said''the smarter you are , the longer it takes.'' Hey HiFi ,i like trading out of my home office; nobody paid me ''almost nothing'' to learn to trade.Costly , but well worth it.I am not cut out to work for some one else. . Wisdom is profitable to direct, Crayola crayons are better than felt tip color pens, like Jack says. .LOL Most banks give away ink pens.
Ok my turn to chime in. Threads like these REALLY bother me. Correct me if i am wrong but you are a SENIOR in college and you are posting on here about a career in trading. This REALLY REALLY bothers me. What makes you really think you want to get into trading for a living? I am a junior in college and also interested in trading but i have been looking for internships in trading since the summer before my JUNIOR year. Here you are MARCH of your SENIOR year and your asking for this. Bottom line people like you really bother me. I may not have the greatest academic credentials but i make up for it with passion, and a hard work ethic towards this business. NOTHING is going to be handed to you my friend. NOTHING. I am to the point where I cannot even sleep without thinking about my future career. Saying you want to be a trader is not like saying you want to be a lawyer or a doctor. This is a business people get passionate about. When was the last time you knew people that stayed up in the wee hours studying human resources or molecular biology in their PERSONAL time. You are up against the people that want to do this more than anything. I would give my right arm for a shot with a legit firm in this business. I willing to do whatever it takes. The big problem i have is im having a tough time really taking you serious. Start spending hours a day reading everything you can about the market. Do that for 3 years and then come back and make this post and i will have a lot more respect for you. Bottom line is your competing against the people that absolutely love this business. People that have the drive to suceed of olympic athletes. If you thought that trading was osmething you could just stumble into you are greatly mistaken. Maybe you should take up some other form of business if that was your perception. Now if you are still reading this then good congrats this was your first step in earning my respect. My advice, start spending your personal time researching everything you can about this business. Then make this post again. You post comes off like you have absolutely no passion for this. BIG NO NO. Have a great weekend.
Wow, Brent, ease the fuck up, huh? First, trading is great. Obviously, I like it a lot since, well, I'm a trader. But let's not pretend you slinging a few contracts around is the equivalent of curing Cholera. It's a job, man. I went through a lot, too, to get into this business, but you make it sound like you have to spend your nights flagellating yourself under hot lamps to get into the club. Second, your attacking him for asking about trading advice is his senior year of college? Like it's too late or something? Your right, if you're not on your chosen career track by the last year of nursery school, you might as well drink hemlock. Sure. I didn't even know what a futures contract was when I graduated college, and I'm doing okay. I just hope, being 28 and all, that I'll be able to get another good year or two in before I die. *cough*
you might want to find out what traders actually do. "trader" means different things at different places.
I enjoyed reading your post. Lots of candor. I followed a path quite different than yours or the OP. I was read, page by page, the WSJ in the office of the depatrment head where I was a graduate instructor during grad school. I was 24, probably. It took an hour and the topic was faculty salaries and how they compared to those in the fields I had studied. All faculty member in the department were investors and traders because salaries were just nominal income. Trading was just an amateur thing to do so that income from working wasn't important. So I learned: Income from working is not important. You haven't learned this as yet. You probably will not learn it. As a consequence of learning "Income from working is not important." I got a job at IBM and it turns out I worked there for 5 years. This proved to me that "Income from working is not important". My weekly commissions by the third year were equal to or greater than my salary. IBM is not a McDonalds type place. The reading of the WSJ was very different than what you read in your "personal" time. I did borrow a book fron a friend who thought like me. Magee, 4th ed. The WSJ was great reading and I kept each last page where the "quotes" were. I used them to make money. I took the HLC and volume from the paper and put it on a chart for stocks I was watching. I watched stocks that had very high ranges of the 52 week data going from Z to A. I moved from Poughkeepsie to Greenwich to Zurich suburb to Bucks County to Phoenix to Tucson in my life. I lived where I wanted for various reasons: job to sailing to skiing and mtn climbing to colonial stone home with horse trails to desert and wilderness and exploration internationally. What did I learn in that hour of reading the WSJ page by page? To make money price has to change. You have to be in the market to make money. Stay on the right side of the market to make money. I also learned Owners of companies are the ones who make the most money. You can't make any money, comparitably speaking, on a salary or commission. If you make money owning (trading) companies, etc., you can live anywhere and do it. Charting with a pencil taught me that stocks move 20% every 6 to 8 days. I learned to enter as a stock was starting to go up at the beginning of the 20% run up using the P, V relationship shown on the charts I pencilled. I learned that channels drawn on the charts told me when the market was long and when it was short. I did my trading by getting ready each evening and making a call to the broker in the morning after I arrived at work. I put 50% of my paycheck into my account after I started it with 300 dollars. (by mail) I did not take money out of my account because I was practicing compounding my capital. The profit per cycle was 10% plus and the number of trades was 40 to 60 a year. I did not make money on 1 out of 8 trades, I found out. If I wasn't making money I put the money into another choice. My third year of employment I made some adjustments. I got married. I got a new car (MB 190SL (1960)). I took an extra weeks vacation each summer in Europe. I stopped the 50% addition to my account and dropped it to 10%. IBM let me play golf during working hours occasionally as a way to destress from job assignments. My life is about over now. By eliminating all my needs from the get go, I was able to do what I wished, mostly. Being in a neat place at the right time is serendipity. I had serendipity at my side all my life. You get to have serendipity by having more money than you can use for any life style you want. The amateur path in trading is the most fun of all. It is freedom in the larger sense. I never had a quest to follow. I didn't have to ever feel there was any limit on anything. Once I saw how to pencil charts, I could see what the compound interest formula was saying. It said that about every 6 to 8 lines I drew on a chart I would be over 10% richer and every 7 or 8 cycles I would have twice the money. As an engineer I had a slide rule, so I knew how to do arithmatic and exponents and stuff. Engineers do graphs very easily. Semi log paper is very common at places like IBM and college book stores. So far you and the OP have missed the boat, in my opinion. Here is what to consider. Income from working is not important. It does not matter how much money you start with. Do EOD trading for a few years while you have a job. Just be an amateur retail trader. Do 10% plus every 6 to 8 days. Compound all of your trading profits. Do anything you want your whole life. Caveats You will be asked to trade OPM. You will be asked to take partnerships in money groups. You will be asked to be an Adj Prof in a lot of fields (the B-schools are fun ones) You will be asked to write books. Swiss ski instructors are usually as busy as they want to be in the evenings. The same trading template applies to all kinds of markets and instruments. The conventional orthodoxy deosn't make much money.
Ultimately, trading is a lone activity where you must figure everything out yourself. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you can begin to progress towards consistent profitability. I have a mentor - two, really - both of whom will answer any questions I have about any trades I make and review thoroughly my performance. I can sit and watch them trade and ask questions about why they get into and out of positions and I have a strong understanding of their various edges. Having access to mentors cuts the learning curve for me, by keeping me from wasting my time chasing dead-end methods. But I am completely on my own. I can utilize the concepts my mentors use in getting in trades, and sometimes I will take an identical setup to one they would take - but nothing in the market is every identical or straightforward or black and white, and it always requires subjective judgement. Only I can press the buy and sell keys. This may seem unrelated to the question you pose about how to proceed from your senior year in college to a lifestyle of successful trading. it isn't. You should start now. Study markets. Study charts. Read the books on trading a bit, just to get an idea of what's done, but form your own opinions - the more open minded you can be when looking at a chart, or a company's fundamentals, or whatever you choose to trade off of, the more likely you can spot what the crowd does not yet see. And trade for yourself. If you do not like doing your own research now - studying markets, charts - you won't like it later. Trading is something you're passionate about or not. You can't know until you throw yourself at it. After college, apply for various trading jobs... trying to learn from industry insiders is a great advantage, but prepare yourself to be on your own. If you have to work a job and spend your spare time studying markets, that's fine. There is no easy money in trading. It will take time. More time than you expect. If you want it, even after not having reached the level of success you hoped to be at after X months or - most likely - years - and you keep going, you'll get it... if you love it.
I also like how "Big Brent" can practically insist that someone "earn his respect," but he can't spell or coordinate sentences worth a damn.
Ok now its my turn to chime in. Post like these REALLY bother me. Who the hell are you, to tell him that he has no passion? How do you know he hasn't been watching cnbc (for a lack of a better channel), reading the WSJ, and trading a small retail account since he was 13? It's bad enough we successful and respected traders sometimes on this website, putting other members down with a critical and arrogant attitude; now we have a junior in college that hasn't made a dime in trading, giving someone else that same attitude! Oh, I forgot you trade for your college finance club. I don't understand you at all. Every post I have read of your's you come across condescending. You make a few points on the ES and its "man what a great day, I learned so much". Which is good and its great that you've learned something about the markets on that day. But when someone makes a few pennies here and there scalping stocks you chime in once again with your attitude " thank god i have something to read this morning. What is the purpose of this thread honestly. You scalped for a nickel.... I am not even going to begin with what is wrong with this thread". Thanks, that was really helpful. You trade to gain experience and so do other new traders, they ask advice and so do you (you were looking for a mentor, were you not?). I'm glad to see that you have passion for this, but writing shit like this only makes you look like a complete idiot and you won't gain no one's respect on here. But I guess, who am I to tell YOU, that you have an attitude.