I see alot of talk about what strategy, what news service, what charting platform should I use when I begin? The truth is, while all of these do come into play there are more important components to getting started trading which can allow you to have a better foundation to build a career off of in this industry. What are some tips you would give to a beginner, or yourself if you had to start from the beginning?
Start by learning the basics. What drives asset prices, who are the various market actors, and what kinds of opportunities are available to trade. I worked at a bank as an analyst and trader and there was a lot of learning before we got to trading.
Have a detailed written trading plan. A business plan you would take to a lender to show how you plan to make money and convince them to back you.
Collect your own data & make decisions based on it. For free, with sims/demos/journal. ,,Stock Market is a perfect place for competition, because all of the information is equily available to everyone" - G.Soros , Alchemy of Finance
1. Start Small. Be very prudent with margins. Anything above 10:1 is too high when starting out, imo. Try to trade with cash if you can. Once you start to become more profitable, you may trade with higher margins. CFTC has set the margin ceiling in Spot Forex to be 50:1, on par with futures and that should be the maximum margin for any traders for all financial instruments no matter how large your financial capital imo. If Bill Hwang can't handle 600% margin with $100 billion assets, neither can you. 2. Backtest, backtest, and backtest more 3. Do NOT trade until the strategy is at least 6 months, preferably a year profitable in backtesting 4. Be prepared to lose and lose BIG 5. In Forex, watch out for market-making brokers that trade against you. Try to sign up with brokers that charge a commission and with tight spreads that do not have outrageous margin policies. Anything above 100:1, chances are the broker is a market-making broker and is trying to entice you to trade bigger in order to profit more from you.
Odd thread...It reads like a complete beginner asking honest questions about how to get started. However I see the post seems to be from a Prop trading firm? (a Risk Mgr at a Prop firm). If that is correct then maybe this thread is just "fishing" for customers?
How to running in financial business is like walking in the jungle, there are so many animals wild could endanger human security, without proper equipment and experience, will face so many obstacles on the way.
Interesting take on both, I think an unbiased objective viewpoint would be someone is trying to gather a wealth of information to better assist traders they help or to educate newer people in the steps they should take
Id debate that the learned in the beginning is more important than the actual trading. In order to survive long term, you need to have a foundation of good habits and knowledge to trade off of. Unstable foundations will eventually crash. Love it!