Hi, A few months ago I became interested in the stock market, I joined sharebuilder and just lat month I bought my first two stocks (IMAX and ATVI), since that time I have learned that I am going to recieve a pretty decent amount of money (roughly 100K after taxes) that I would like to invest. Since I am a total newbie I started doing some google searches and quickly came across a bunch of get rich quick sites like mrswing.com, besttrader.com, worldsbestjob... blah blah blah, being the skeptic that I am I downloaded all of their free trial software etc.. so that I could study and learn the stock market and just get a feel for everything. Eventually after several weeks of searches I stumbled across the ET site and I must say that I am quite impressed, I have been scouring the forums reading every thread that seemed revelant to me trying to pick up bits and pieces of information. So now I have decided to make my first post and ask for some advice.... As someone who is new to the markets what do you guys recommend that I study? Any book recommendations, websites etc... Also as someone who is new to all of this, roughly what kind of annual gain should I be looking/expecting to make? I know that this is hard to say as the possibilites of gaining and losing money are limitless but what is a good target percentage? One thing that i have learned from reading all of the past posts etc.. is that i don't know sh*t and knowing that I don't know sh*t is going to keep me from investing one more dollar into the market untill I have the confidnece and knowledge to do so. One thing that I know I need to start doing is paper trading and I plan on starting on that next Monday. Any and all advice is welcome and much appreciated! Thanks,
HEllo DrOfBacon, Be prepared of at least 1 year of studies on the market, you will be experiencing many up and downs where ups you think you finally have the market until the next down you feel clueless, but just keep trudging on, it will take at least 1 year of almost full time analyzation and understand of what makes the market tick , why do people sell, wheres the best place to enter, money management, control, fear, greed, you will go through all of it. Gains will depend on 1) leverage 2) what you play 3) method of trading long term traders will seek lower gain but have bigger capital (3-10-15%) short term traders will utilize leverage and seek higher gains (3-5-10-50-100% gains a month) more better the plan, more leverage you can use the more you make. worse the plan, more leverage you can use, the faster you will be visiting the homeless shelter Good luck my friend
DR; Jack Schwager ,DR Van Tharp are must reads/rereads; and ''Big Trends'' by Price Headly & 'William O Neil books/website'', investors.com. And its an oversimplification but did notice IMAX likes above a 50 day moving average, when its strong; not a prediction. And when its below 50 day moving average; polar bears may slam it like a side of Canadian bacon.
Here are some good books: http://www.trading-naked.com/Articles_and_Reprints.htm Read as many as you can. Don't think about % return. This is beyond your scope at the moment. Open a retail account with no more than .01/share (or $1/100 share trade) in commissions and trade 100 shares at a time. (PM me if you want sme suggestions for a broker that does this). Spend (losing is learning, i.e. money well spent) the money you've afforded to risk to find out what works for you in real time. The only way to learn how to trade is by doing it. You reduce the cost of the above if you write a plan to only trade certain price movements (patterns) with and alotted risk. But, you need to earn solid fiscal, and more importantly, solid EMOTIONAL discipline in order to execute the plan and limit the risk. Notice I said earn discipline. You should look at the next year as an excersize in earning discipline, developing good habits and refining a plan. Make your goal one focused around the above ideas and not about the money and you will be alright. Mike