I was 16 when my dad got me started. I lost everything the first year. I started with trading stocks and now I'm trading the ES and the German Bund. I'm 19 now and I am slowly paying him back. I guess if you wanted to teach a teen to trade, give him a strategy to work with and money you can afford to lose ofcourse. After a while I was hooked on trading. I tried to come up with my own strategy, since the strategy my dad had taught me was just to prevent me from clicking around whenever I felt like it. It taught me discipline, even though I lost all the money the first year.
What a great idea!Teach him just like a video game..Make sure $ is out of his head.Tell him its POINTS! Give him your basics and POINTS not dollars is KEY.Kids are great at video games and That is just what we do.PLAY A GAME!
Could it be that the folks you know who began hanging out on the floor as little kids were the survivors? How about all the kids who grew up, got the clerk job, and blew out. Know plenty of those....
2traps, Jessie, Cathy, wally, trader924, fourcups, Thanks everybody... for your good words and ideas.
I just wanted to report what happened with this project that's so near and dear to my heart. There may be lessons for all parents here - I know I've learned a lot and hope to do better next year. Well, my son (will turn 14 next month) embarked upon this journey with "some" enthusiasm. Glad the school was over (he graduated 8th grade, almost at the top of his class) and eager to finally get this trading knowledge and experience. The truth is that he had shared some details with his friends who had asked questions like, "what's trading", "will you be going to Wall Street every day", and, most often, "sounds boring." He went through 4-5 trading books (Alex Elder, Sunny Harris, Tony Oz) like hot knife through butter. After each one, I had a brief discussion with him, and confirmed that he had picked up the main points. When he couldn't really understand the concept and application of Bollinger Bands, he searched through my books, found the book by John Bollinger and read half of it in a couple of hours. No problem there! Then he went though some training CDs: Tony Oz, Don Miller, Kevin Haggerty, Dave Floyd, etc. Liked the Oz course and the simulations of the other CDs. Here the speed of advance dropped drastically, as it started becoming clear that this wasn't so much fun any more. I wanted him to use Ensign (the playback feature) and get a whole lot of real (past) results and then use the Futures Trader simulator and get some real-time results. He had actually used the FT program with a separate account I have at IB for a couple of days, with a simple MA-crossing technique I had defined for him (similar to Don Miller's) and had gotten positive results (real-time) each of those days. But the training CDs seem to last forever and, during the course of the trading day, he started taking multi-hour breaks and chatting with his friends via AIM and then grabbing his bike for long rides and going for extra sparring sessions at his Tae Kwon Do school. Other than that, he started to look totally bored, which is never a good sign. I told him that in a real job he would have been fired a couple of times and arranged that he have a long conversation with his mother (a trained Psychologist [PhD] who had intentionally stayed out of the details of this "summer job" to give him some extra room to handle his feelings about it.) Her report, which he later confirmed, was that he didn't see the point, his parents make anough money, why should he be working, he'd rather spend the summer having fun. Trading is interesting to learn, but why does he have to apply it? Towards what end? Well, I should have seen this coming, and, I'm sure, other, more experienced parents on ET are smiling already. There's no motivation here, other than an initially strong curiosity to see what Dad does for a living. Just to see, just to understand, not to practice. I had to hold down a summer job since the age of 12 - seriously enough that I have pocket money to spend the rest of the year. Coming from that background, I never thought that he doesn't have the same perspective on life. I'm happy my wife and I can provide a lot more for our two children, but we may not be helping them develop sufficient motivation to grab the bull of professional life by the horns, so to speak. My wife, of course, says that I have the tendency to push him to grow up (and I don't deny some of it) and that we should just wait for him to catch up. Of course, she's right. On a more positive note, I was looking for my latest issue of TA of S&C this morning (it's Saturday) and I found out that he had taken it with him to the hair cutting place my wife drove him this morning. He claimed that he's practically finished with it by the time they returned, and I tend to believe him. I thought that this must be some sort of a good sign, that a little bit of his mind, if not his heart, has opened up to this wonderful field. Tomorrow he's leaving for a 3-week camp in Pennsylvania - he has two more "trading weeks" to go though when he returns. He says that trading was a whole lot of fun and that he really enjoyed it, especially the learning part. But, could he spend some of that remaining time learning Japanese so that he can impress one of the cutest (Japanese American) girls in his class? Oh well... I guess we have to be happy with what we get, right?
Yannis, You're a good dad. This would have been a great journal. I admire you for it. I have a quick story that is similar. I sat my two sons down one night. Ages 16 and 13 at the time and did an exercise with them about compounding. I had my 13 year old put a little away starting now. I told my 17 year old to pretend he was 30, but he was able to put a lot more away each month. Next I had them both compound out at 5% interest until they were each 65. You know the story. They were amazed and could not believe it. Talked about it for weeks. My oldest son was ready to start saving any minute. Long since forgotten now!!!
OOPS! This story was going so well... until I read the last sentence Maybe some of us haven't accepted the fact that our kids will make their own decisions and will (at least initially) stay away from what their parents told them to do.
Quote from Avalanche: Age 14? I would give him Reminiscences of a Stock Operator and How I Made 2,000,000 in the Stock Market to read... Nitro, Anvalanche, I did give him Lefevre's book (I don't have the other one) and he's just told me that it's in his suitcase - he'll read it at camp.