Where can I get some good education about trading with thinkorswim? Any good advisory letters that are profitable and educative? I'm from Vancouver, BC. Looking for a coach/mentor. Anyone up for the challenge? Thanks, Leon
Umm, if you look for a mentor, 99% of the people who accept your offer probably don't know how to trade. Be very very very careful. If they offer to coach you free or for a low price (couple of hundred) and show you some pointers, that is probably OK. But do some looking at their background. The industry is full of people, companies and entities who will charge you $6,000-$12,000 and leave you no closer to success. Some of them cruise around the country, renting hotel conference rooms and blanketing the local newspaper with ads. You come for a freebie session,and wind up being pressured to drop "just a small $1500" that night for "the class which will be this weekend in your area". And then of course, they are pushing you to upgrade for $10-$20 grand to get "their master's" program as a trader. The only thing it will do, is leave your bank account much emptier. You should probably start with studying some of the recent threads by newbies looking for help. There is always a few gems in such places. But be very very very careful. Most helpful people know little more than you do, and are profitable on paper only.
I'm gonna give you the best piece of advice you'll ever hear and hopefully you won't forget it. Give up on trading now and go back to school. Put your heart and soul into some other profession. This is coming from a guy who has been trading profitably for 20 years. Do something else.
If you're from Vancouver, there is a resident psycho here from Vancouver who claims to be a hugely successful emini trader. Problem is, he has a new user name every day. But he's professed his guilt and has said he wants to give back somehow. Maybe he'll take you under his wing? He used to go by "Cold". Also Jasonn/C-kid/insert/infooo and many more.
You are wrong. The advice was extremely good. Trying to make it in trading is one of the most extreme wastes of time in the world. It is believed that maybe 95% of traders lose their money. But of the remaining "5%" - almost all of them only break even, make small amounts, or are profitable for only a short time. Or they are "pre Risk of Ruin" traders who did not get the inevitable come-uppance yet. I would say the number of traders who make a longterm very good living from trading is something less than 0.3% of all traders who try. Few people have the resources (tens of thousands $$$) and maybe 8-12,000 hours of screen time. They read books, chase indicators, get self-dazzled with Gann, EW, Fibs, pitchforks, and then wander around, blow up, give up, retry, and eventually disappear into the tar pit of trading reality. The paper trading masses of EliteTrader is no judge of "trading success" but of the fact that they are trader wannabes.
the waste is in doing something half heartedly, that is all. if you go at it with every effort u can muster, and do not give up, u will eventually succeed, tho it may not be in a timely manner..
Trading is perhaps the hardest career of all. It demands far more efforts and dedications than physicist/geneticist/chemist ever put into their professions.
Most jobs that people consider tough are jobs where you have to put in long hours of busy work. Trading is tougher because you have to dedicate years of your life to an uncertainty. However it is much easier if you have tunnel vision. In other words most profitable traders come about by having the attitude if I die a profitless trader then I die.