How will you fund a trading account? How will you support yourself while learning? Why did you go to college and get a degree? Do you have a business plan for trading? I left a corporate job in 1996 to trade. I had traded part time for 2 years. Further, I had saved $$$$. I also had no debt -- no mortgage, no car payments, no credit card debt. Early on trading can be intimidating. Even if you have a decent sized account. I still trade full time. I enjoy it. I learned what works for me. I trade with discipline. I accept losses; they're part of the game. My advice to you -- use your degree, find a job, save some $$$ so that you can fund an account with a reasonable amount of money. Don't try to start with $5K or $10K.
There are 4 useful things you can do: 1. Read LOTS of trading books. I mean several hundred. Most will be garbage but some are excellent. Ones I liked were Jack Schwager's "Market Wizards" series, Lefevre's "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator", Drobny's "Inside the House of Money", John Train's "New Money Masters", Stanley Kroll's "The Professional Commodity Trader", Victor Sperandeo's two "Trader Vic" books, Gary Smith's "How I Trade for a Living". I suggest reading them once, then rereading them a few times over the next few years, they will make more sense once you have more market experience. Make sure to always take notes on a book when you read it, otherwise it mostly goes in one ear and out the other. 2. Follow the markets and observe them closely. Keep a diary and note down i) what is happening ii) what you think will happen in future iii) what actually happens in future iv) what you were wrong about (and what you were right about) v) lessons learned from how your expectations diverged from what happened. This should get you learning how the market actually works, rather than how you assume it should work. 3. Find a trading mentor, someone with plenty of market experience, and who has made a decent amount of money out of trading. Pick their brains and learn as much as you can. You may have to do some grunt work in return, but it will be worth it. 4. Get a job at a firm that does trading in the markets. That way you get paid a salary in order to learn to trade. Much easier than going it alone. If you can't or won't get trading employment, then you need to save up enough money and then experiment with trading 1 lots until you get experience yourself, the hard way. Ultimately the way to learn trading is to trade with real money and learn from your mistakes.
I didn't have a business plan for trading when I started, other than "let's see if I can do this". I didn't have any savings, and got my funds by borrowing 10k. In other words, I violated all your advice. Others who have done far better started with even worse situations - Bruce Kovner started with 3k in credit card debt, now he's a billionaire. Richard Dennis started with $400. I'm not saying it isn't better if someone follows your advice and starts like that. Starting with 50k and no debts is better than starting with 3k in credit card debt. But it's not that different - in both cases you have a piker-size account and the odds are against you. The main determinant of success will be your ability and your effort. The most important thing is not your starting capital, but your innate abilities and determination, and the commitment to just start and give it a shot. If you can't give it a shot from an ideal starting position, give it a shot from a less than ideal starting position. The latter is better than not starting for 5-10 years because you are waiting until you have 50-100k and no debts.
Starting capital is overrated. There is a good chance that you will lose your entire starting capital at least once before you really learn to trade. And losing 25k, if it's all you have, doesn't teach you any more lessons about risk and discipline than losing 5k or even 1k, if it's all you have. So in a way, it's better to start with small amounts of $$$, when you have little or nothing to lose, and it won't set you back for years if you lose it all. It is far more valuable to start within say 6-12 months after watching the markets for a while, and learn by actually trading and losing/making real money, and keeping a diary of your trading, than it is to sit around saving up money without trading a dime. Gaining experience is everything. The only way to do that is to actually trade. Anything that makes you not trade - such as conservative rules about starting capital - is detrimental to your long-term chances of success. The goal of your first year or two trading is not really to make enough money to live off (that will only happen if you are lucky), it is to learn how to trade.
Occasionally a few individuals are lucky and make it being under capitalized etc. But ask yourself how many people open a business - restaurant, retail, services, etc. that do not have adequate initial capital and that lack a business plan. Those who choose to not have such greatly increase the likelihood of failure. In my case I was leaving a corporate job. Thus, I wanted a backup plan (i.e. if I failed at trading) to fall back on. Winging it, as some do, makes it a crapshoot IMO.
I read a quote somewhere that "luck" can be defined as, "when preparedness meets opportunity." Very few successful traders have made it totally unscathed. Just maybe burning an account or two is all part of the journey. If you lose the money, don't lose the lesson.
In reality, don't let anonymous paper traders like this one convince you this in any way is a strong expectation or something that will happen in 6-12 months. Trading is a profession, like the medical field. -- You won't get there only by reading a few books or studying posts -- 10,000 hours of screen time is what many here said it took them. -- Monkeying around with Fibonacci, Elliott Wave, indicators/most Technical Analysis, Fundamentals will likely throw you off track until you realize many people here gave up and looked for things that actually might work. -- Expect 1 or more blowouts of your trading capital -- Be prepared to invest 3-5 years of time and perhaps $50,000 in losses along the way, for the POSSIBILITY of succeeding. -- Probably good to avoid options, forex, and index futures -- If you expect to retire on a $7,000 account, then spend a lot more time studying the realities of trading. -- Many successful traders here seem to favor mastering a few individual stocks -- for the most part, stay away from scalping (tiny profits in very short periods). The commissions, bid/ask spread, slippage are the same as for holding longer but with much smaller payoffs, and you will not have the cost advantages that institutional traders enjoy. -- stay away from ANYTHING or ANY ADVICE by Jack Hershey or SpyderTrader. Their methods lured many newbie ETers onto the rocks. Eventually, you will probably realize that it is mostly about deeply learning how market prices/charts work. Support/Resistance, trendlines, pure price action seem to be what most of the people here who talk about what eventually worked for them. These are probably good places to start. Very important to master money management & trade management (stop losses, profit targets, leverage, diversification, etc. etc. But it boils down to this. The prevailing view is that 95% will lose their trading capital. And that "5%" includes breakevens, people making small amounts of money, and people making money for short periods of time. Making $100,000 a year for the next 10-20 years, your chances are likely less than 0.5%. You can try it, but have a sober assessment of what the realities are and what it will take to REALLY succeed.
how do I work for a firm that will mentor me and let me trade with their funds? all the job-listings ive seen have been for desks that require starting capital... i would love the opportunity to watch and experience any pro-trading firm.