And I recently decided to try myself in poker. I hope I will succeed. Maybe you can share some tips as an experienced player?
The main difference between trading and poker is you can't study your opponents individually for tells, etc. Bluffing is not really a thing, either. You can't really misrepresent what you hold, or represent what you hold when you got the nuts. You can't scare the market like you can scare a table. The market can scare YOU, but not consciously. It is easy to lose your nerve or just the opposite, get a little too brave for your britches. And you should never play with money that you can't afford to lose. Also, there is no ante. You can stay at the table and just play the good hands if you want. Similarities are many. Biggest similarity is the importance of good money management and risk assessment and management. And above all else, establishing your own personal trading/playing rules and sticking to them, no matter what. Oh, and day trading is very close to a zero sum game. To win a buck, someone else has to lose a buck, essentially. And the big fish are after you. You as a new trader are LUNCH. Yum! Thanks for bringing your money to our table! IOW, be ready to make serious beginner losses even after considerable study and practice. Same with poker "lessons" learned the first hundred or so games. You pay to learn, no two ways about it. Most of the general learn to daytrade books just rehash the same stuff. Pick two with good reviews from Amazon and you will have the basics covered. My first book was "How to Day Trade for a Living: A Beginner’s Guide to Trading Tools and Tactics, Money Management, Discipline and Trading Psychology", Amazon link: . Just like all the "how to be a professional poker player" books, these authors all want to sell you something. My advice is you already bought the book, done and done. Nearly any advice I could give is already in the book. If you start with an account of over $25k, the general best practice rules you will find parrotted in the mainstream books will work pretty well. With a very small account, things are different, and because you are only allowed 3 day trades in any 5 trading day period, you have to make them count, once you are making profit after study, much practice from paper trading, and careful live trading in small positions. The way to make them count is first and foremost, evaluate your risk tolerance and set your risk allowance appropriately to your funding, re-funding ability, account size, and personal psychological configuration. In other words, pounce on the good hands and bet out strongly when you are holding the nuts. This for day trades, where you close your position before the end of the day. The other way is to let a position ride overnight when it looks good. The next day you can sell and not trigger your day trade counter. You can also open a cash account and have unlimited small day trades but all money has to "settle" for a couple of days before it is available to you again for buying more stock. You can also use an offshore broker that does not have to follow the Pattern Day Trader rules that require you to have $25k in your account in order to make more than 3 day trades in 5 days, but personally I don't like the idea. When trading with a small account, I do best when I am only in ONE position, with a large portion of my account in it, with a properly set stop order. A stop is a standing order to sell if the stock goes below the price you set for the order. This prevents catastrophic losses, first of all. After a stock's prices rise significantly, it can be used to lock in a portion of your unrealized profits. Sort of like automatically leaving the table while you are still a winner or at least not badly beaten, except your brokerage does that for you. Initially you will paper trade. Sort of like sim poker. The game isn't quite the same as live poker with real money, and paper trading isn't quite the same as live trading with real money. Yet it is an essential part of the learning process. It prevents you from losing money making stoopid noob mistakes such as keyboard or mouse fumbles, or misreading a chart, or placing the wrong order type. After a couple months of that, time to trade for keepers. Trade very small positions, to keep your losses small. There WILL be losses, a lot of them, so keep them small, live to play another day without funding your account up again. When you are consistently profitable, reconsider position size, bringing risk and earnings up where you want them. Always trade with a stop. Set it low enough that the stock price has room to move, but not so far down that you are ruined before it stops you out. Your stop needs to be set below a logical level of price support, so your entry should be just above that, assuming a "long" position, where you seek to buy low and sell high. Your profit target needs to be at a logical level and should be at least 3x the distance from your break-even as the stop is, and you should have greater than even chance of winning. This is a tried and true recipe for profitable days. The only catch is in the implementation. Your choice of broker is important. It would take me too long to list the things that make a broker good or not so good for your purposes but the run of the mill books all go into that. Every day, every completed trade, you need to evaluate your decisions and determine what you got right and what you did wrong. It is hard to post-play analyze every hand in a long poker session but it is pretty easy in a trading day to analyze all of your trades. Biggest money loser once you understand the mechanics of the game is NOT FOLLOWING YOUR OWN RULES. Keep that in mind. As well as the fact that 90% of new traders fail. Don't be surprised if you find that trading is not for you. Or that you are okay at swing trading but not at day trading. And above all, set a total loss limit, beyond which you will cease trading instead of throwing good money in after bad. That sounds kind of poker-ish, too, huh?