trading plan for newbies: 1. buy stock for whatever reason. 2. Don't sell when it moves against you. 3. Blow up account. 4. Save money for new account. 5 Repeat steps 1 thru 4. fan27
Always find it weird that people recommend equities vs futures. It's true that futures give you more leverage, but no-one forces you to use it. A newbie trading a 1-lot is unlikely to blow-up due to excessive leverage. Of course, if we are saying that newbies are likely to use the leverage just because they don't know any better, well, we could use the same arguement that they will trade too many shares at a time. The best advice would then be to not trade until they are better educated. Anyway, I would say pick the product that you are most comfortable with and trade small / minumum size until consistent.