What's the smallest bankroll you would start trading with? Is a few thousand dollars enough, or will the fees be too high? Are some markets and trading strategies more workable than others with a smaller bankroll?
small is fine. since you will likely make 1-2 ES points a day, easy. so add $100 a day at the minimum. an easy 2k a month, and in 5 months when you have 10k+ go to 3 contracts. then make $300 a day..... and it will be less than a year and you will be easily making $2000 a day, maybe more. so, open up your virtual bank and start printing money and live the life you deserve!!!!
Small bankroll will get much smaller if you have less than five years experience trading. It be better to learn for three years and develop your rules. Then trade long term on weekly charts on stocks $10 to 20 bucks. Most will go through $50k before they figure out how to day trade. Get a demo acount set up and when you can take a $5k acount tripled three seperate times, you have a chance of doing real time. Otherwise in real time, you will have no bankroll.
Keeping in mind there is a difference between starting to trade and leaving work to tradem to start use what ever you have to make do with. If you end up spending 50k to learn to trade you were risking way to much.
What many DON'T think about is total loss, money aside, the time one spends learning and "they" say 95% lose, all the hours one could have been flipping burgers or getting a Doctorates' degree, buying computers, software, internet, learning to program, etc.... It all adds up, lots and lots of wated time for the many, and of course all had pipedreams of this being so simple. Trading is like going to Vegas in November and play poker at World Series of Poker, you have $2,000 and Tran has 38 million, what are the odds?
It's a good point. However I'm the kind of person that I'm going to spend my spare time learning about something most people consider very nerdy. So I'll be costing myself time reading "Large Scale C++ Software Design" (for fun, not work). That's how I started playing online poker. I realized I had spent over 1000 hours playing video games, and figured I should make some money with my hobby instead. Now it's of questionable legal status in the U.S. so I think trading is next on my list. I totally understand that most people fail, and I'm seeing that it's much like sports betting and poker in that it comes down to you having an edge, and understanding that edge, and working hard to find new edges.
I actually did start trading (1957). I didn't wait until I had a specified amount of money. All I did was learn for 20 days and then felt comfortable about using money to make money. I opened an account with 300 dollars and traded odd lots (stocks). Since I was just out of college and had no debts or responsibilities, I added 50% of my salary every two weeks. At the time I was just netting 10% every 6 to 8 days. So it was a slow process. For the last 55 years about nothing has changed. (The costs are cheaper and the PC has been invented) I worked for five years and about year three my salary was less than my commissions. By year three I was travelling (Europe every summer) and buying nice toys to play with (sports cars and sailboats, etc.)
Why not bail out the rest of the universe? You must have on the order of infinity dollars about now, so what's a few GDP among world leaders?