c'mon guys, give the gentleman a break, before a baby walks it has to crawl- we all started somewhere. At least he has a good attitude, you have to give him that. Just learn the ropes and keep the education as inexpensive as possible.
dvda420 I suggest for starters you open an account with IB and subscribe to Ensignsoftware. Study the charts and price action, put thousands of hours in. I believe an excellent article on price action written by Buffy, who posts in the Ensign B-line chat room. Her article can be found at http://www.ensignsoftware.com/tips/tradingtips38.htm#Price http://www.dacharts.com/articles/Buffy_on_price_action.php http://www.trading-naked.com/PriceAction.htm In the meantime don't be caught by sharks lurking on ET offerning to provide training. You can do it yourself. Keep working at your day job. It will take between 2-4 years to become a profitable trader. Read this journal by no pm please http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showt...=6&pagenumber=1 Good luck
...should get out of the way of those that are doing it. I agree that you should open an account at IB. But first I would consider subscribing to www.stockfetcher.com for a quarter. It's a very good site for technical traders. You can set-up screens and backtest them. Spend 3 months coming up with a strategy that you think you can trade. Also read "Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom" by Van K. Tharp. That book helped me tremendously. When you finally start trading, don't leverage. Start with small positions. After a year or two, if you're still in the game, you can up your position size. Baby steps.... Be mentally prepared to lose your $5000. It may happen, it may not. But you really don't know how you're going to react until you start risking your own money. It has taken me 6 years to get to the point where I can consider myself a successful trader. Yes, most people lose money. But it's because they don't design a winning strategy and stick to it, or they don't start with enough capital. You really should start with more capital, but I started with $2000, and I'm still here. Good luck.
Advice on how to make it: get a free IB demo account , daytrade QQQQ until profitable on your free time. Get a part time job work at night whatever. You also won't be making a dime in you first year more like spending your $5k I'm a fast learner and it took me almost 1 full year full time to finally learn the markets, I thought it would be faster, but you need to go through all the market cycles to learn about each cycle, bear cycles, bull cycles etc. but I have no money requirements as well so the position may be different. If you need money to eat, you will not make any money here for the first year during your apprenticeship.
hey dvda420 I would suggest u to do paper tradingfor 3 to 5 months learn and practice on certain stocks like qqqq intc watch them trade them and u will get a good hang of it I know $200 or $300 a day isnothing but to making it is difficult cause thing does not always work as u think u could make $1000 a week is also a good thing bt u have to practice and pratce get how much every information u get rest it all up to you
It is possible to make money trading .. dont let the negativity here get to you. sevenfirs post is a great starting point and those sites are more inspirational than here. Good Luck.
Funny post coming from someone who doesn't even trade intraday. Unfortunately the market doesn't listen to your positive self-talk!
Amazing the amount of people on here that dont have an elemetary understanding of math....ok lets break it down....2 traders both start with 10k each...one guy shorts the stock, one guy buys it. Each trader pays 20 dollars for a commission round turn. Person A makes 500 gross pays a 20 dollar commission...Person B losses 500 gross pays a 20 dollar commission....by my math.. 10k +500 -20 = 10480 for person A 10k -500 -20 = 9480 for person B 10480 + 9480 +40 = 20k both players together had started with 20k between them...how is that not zero sum?
You're not taking into account that stocks trend higher over 5-10-20 years. Also, a lot of sales are done buy insiders and others granted options at very low cost. Those people normally sell at a substantial profit.