If you find online courses and chats confusing, I would suggest you to read ‘Trading Options for dummies’ by Joe Duarte. That’s a good book for starters!
in trading more than anything else. because if you can make money and not lose it you can have the world.
Lets put it this way... Would you pay for trading info (e.g. a book) if someone is selling that book ? I ask the above question only because you made a tongue in cheek like commentary via saying why would he charge for it unless he needs the money which means he is not making any. You're implying he's not profitable at trading. You made the above comment while using the trade methods of Al Brooks along with the fact that you have a trade journal here at the forum about a method by Al Brooks in which you specifically stated you hope to help new traders. My point, there's a contradiction in your beliefs that would confuse others that are new to trading. wrbtrader
There you go, the holy grail: http://www.newtraderu.com/2015/01/13/30-of-the-worlds-best-trading-rules/ But for real i think those are very good principles for successful trading. If you respect every single one of them, you are going to make it. But the thing is, you need experience to know when you are wrong and to develop a plan. For beginning, i would say... start trading with real money. But bet VERY LITTLE amounts. Because you are going to lose it for sure. Consider it a tuition fee. Aim for consistency. Only once you have a proven track record which shows you have an edge, start betting proper sizes. Scale up. The biggest hack there is to trading is to have a mentor that is already successful. But it's probably very hard to find one. Without, it will take you months, probably years of consistent loses to go through all the trial and error until you develop a proper trading plan/system & rules to stand by. Expect to work hard, put in the effort and still lose money even after a year. The biggest takeaway is to LOSE LITTLE. EVERYONE who comes in trading is in it for the fuck&n money... And(almost) everyone fails due to the GREED. It's almost certain that you will be losing money, so burn as little as possible until you reach consistency - which is the ultimate goal and will likely take years(if you even make it) without proper guidance. Bet trivial amounts. Fund your account with a 100quid and bet 1% per trade. If it's too trivial, use a 1000pound account, but you will burn through it quick. Once you start betting more than 1% per trade, you've already lost. I'm talking from experience and where i went wrong. You also mentioned you wanted to trade pure, naked charts... I think that's one of the hardest skills to master and it will take you really a long time and the most important thing is the context(which you derive from higher timeframe charts and the market as a whole. Experience required). The key is to understand the structure of the market so you can follow the trend& go with the flow. It's also hard because it's mostly discretionary and you need experience(which you don't have) to know what to do. If you are using a moving average crossover or something like that-it's simple. Just buy the cross. Trading PA is a whole 'nother story. There are several people on YT with some free videos who trade purely PA, i remember ICT(i wouldn't buy shit from him, he's a snakeoil salesman, but i consider his videos and the principles that he's teaching - decent), traderSZ, cryptocred, Tom dante, Simon kloot and probably some others. But be aware. Once you watch all of their videos. You are a sucker who thinks they know something ( https://jesse-livermore.com/trading-lessons-suckers.html ). Just be aware of it. Watching trading videos&seeing all the theory != experience.
The 4th point is where people fail mostly. Not because they do not set a goal but that goal is very unrealistic led by emotions. Most run after emotions.
That is a pretty good investment source stream, and NOW, while you are young, is the time to start investing heavily. We always do this backwards. We wait until we are 40 or 50 to get serious about investing, but the EARLIER and the MORE you invest early, the better off you are by orders of magnitude. Your investing strategy and Swing Trading can actually be kind of a blurry line. Simple Buy And Hold (BAH, what an acronym!) will make money over the long run. Those who invested in stocks just before the 1929 crash and held their investments, eventually saw their values return and exceed their pre-crash values. Of course, that took 17 years, but you get the idea. In the long term the market goes up. You can increase your overall earnings somewhat by selling underperforming stocks and switching to more currently profitable ones. Or in a general decline, selling and holding cash or gold or whatever. Or buying inverse ETFs, which earn in a declining market, and then going back into stocks and regular ETFs when prices are on the upswing. If you have money invested and you do nothing, you still see gains over the long run. If you gradually become a bit more proactive in managing your investments, you can increase your profitability with the risk of course from not knowing what you are doing, and making mistakes. The investments that you make the earliest, earn the most money, naturally. I suggest steady investment for the next five years in ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds) or stocks, with minimal interference for the first year or two. After five years you could split off a small portion for more active trading, by which time you will hopefully have educated yourself about trading, and spent considerable time in simulated accounts with real time data. ETFs are a good way to start. You buy and sell shares just like stocks, through the same broker you buy and sell stocks. ETFs are an easy way to diversify and have your holdings reflect the market in general. SPDR is sort of the gold standard. QQQ is very popular. For short term advantage there are leveraged funds that go up (or down! Beware!) more or less at twice the rate of the market, or even 3x. There are inverse ETFs where the underlying investment is short sales, IOW betting that the underlying equities will go down in value, which is how they make money in market declines. There are ETFs that make money when the price of gold or silver go up, or down. Often they are in pairs, such as NUGT (makes money when gold goes up) and DUST (makes money when gold goes down) so you can follow the trends and hold the one that is making money in the shorter time frame. You don't need to save money to start investing. There are many brokerages where you can open an account with only $1k or even less. For now, nothing wrong with someone like RobinHood. Very basic brokerage, limited service, not the fastest execution, but you shouldn't care about that right now. Who cares if your trades take 1/4 second or 20 seconds to execute? Zero commissions, so if you do take a more active hand, it won't cost you anything. If you get serious about trading, especially about day trading, you will NEED a broker that offers better trading related service. So what I suggest is take that E1500 from last month's pay, and open up a Robin Hood account. Transfer your funds into your account and you are ready to buy stocks or ETFs. You could do worse than to buy QQQ. It is currently the darling of the ETF world. What the market is doing as a whole, that is what QQQ will be doing. Or buy stock in a company such as United States Steel or AT&T or other long established, heavily capitalized companies. Transfer funds every payday to your brokerage account, and make a firm habit of it. By the end of your first year you should be diversified into at least 4 or 5 ETFs or stocks. And you will, as you say, have E18k PLUS what the investments have earned by increasing in value and in some cases paying dividends. This would be a truly remarkable beginning at age 23. Five years of this and you will have a substantial portfolio and it will be earning some real money, which of course you will cheerfully reinvest. You want to trade? You need three things. You need knowledge. Knowledge that you don't have yet. You need money. Money that you don't have yet. And you need the innate talent and psychology to make it happen. As for day trading, the most commonly quoted piece of conventional wisdom is that 90% of all new traders fail. Fail to make a profit. Fail to even retain their initial stake. Trading is a lot of fun, yeah. But I have still not become profitable after 6 months of study and then 5 months of live trading. I make a little. I lose a little. I think I will become profitable, that I am in the 10% and not in the 90%, or I would not still be doing it. But logically, I could be wrong. I suggest that you buy some books on swing trading. In day trading, you are sniping at trade opportunities, opening and then closing positions of very short duration, usually less than an hour, sometimes less than a minute, and never holding positions overnight. In swing trading, you are looking at multiday or multiweek time frames, capitalizing on less volatile and inherently less risky setups. The day trader is basing his trades on price and volume data, and often doesn't even know the name of the company he is trading, only the ticker symbol. In swing trading, what we call Fundamentals are more important. Information about the company or its products or services, acquisitions, mergers, takeovers, personnel changes, lawsuits, testing, and other news. And the company's financial reports. Price and volume data is still important, but the fundamentals become so, as well. So, there are significant differences between day trading and swing trading. Swing trading and investing can sometimes be quite similar, just a matter of degree. And if you MUST trade, then slowly morphing part of your investment account into swing trading would be sensible. For books, just do a search on Amazon and pick the top three in their category. I won't try to tell you that they are all the same, but yeah, they kinda are. Avoid paid gurus and paid chat rooms and paid courses. IMHO they won't give you anything that you can't learn on your own. Google and believe it or not, Youtube are good research assets. Just keep your BS proof glasses on while viewing, and don't buy anything they are selling.