To start with - this aint a new bull market - go to http://www.bigcharts.com and pull up a ten year weekly chart of the dow. Use one of the interactive charts and put in a 200 pd simple moving average (sma - 200). Notice where price is in relation to the ma. If bulls were indeed in control the price would be above that ma and that ma would not be currently sloping down. It would be flat or sloping up for me to call it a bull market. (my opinion) Everybody has one...lol.. Much good advice has been given on this thread. While it is true that the majority of traders fail, it doesn't mean that any of us have to. What we do have to do is learn and learning usually takes time and money. Go ahead and open an account and get some realtime intraday charts and daytrade the eminies. Go ahead and get your feet wet. Barring some unforseen event, you will live probably 50 more years or so. So go ahead and throw down. Learn something about daytrading and yourself. Chances are it'll cost you that 5000 bux, plus some. But you never know. One thing's for sure it doesn't have to. The fact that it has cost most of us much more than that to learn, doesn't mean that it will beyond a shadow of a doubt be the same for you. It just means that many of us, although smart enough, dedicated enough, etc, etc. etc. Just didn't know beans about what trading is all about and didn't know beans about how we would react to it until we gave it a try. Strive to be patient and trade well and profitability may come to you with your first stake. Consequently many of us (at least the eager ones - myself included when I first started) lost our a$$ in the beginning. You said, I know for 100%(nothing less or nothing more) that I want to be and that I will be a day trader forever. So go ahead young man and get started. Develop a plan, trade your plan with discipline. I can't stress enough - cut losses - cut losses - cut losses. Now vhehn (and others) gave you some good advice, but you are still itching to get your feet wet in daytrading so go ahead. ElectricSavant has given you some good advice as well. While his advice is excellent, I get the feeling that you will and should go ahead and begin your daytrading quest. nkhoi, funky, proptr8r have all given advice to try to keep you in reality. No one intends to fail at trading, but the fact remains that most do. So your education is important and just knowing that you have a good education to fall back on if need be can improve your trading. Really, it can. While trading is about many things, technical analysis, fundamentals etc. , psychology plays a/if not the! most important role of a traders success or lack of success. There are some pretty good books on trader psych - trading in the zone/douglas - trading in the zone/kiev - Financial Freedom Through Electronic Day Trading/Van K. Tharp. That's just to name a few. (Many of the books that have the phrase *electronic daytrading* somewhere in the title are not always great trading books.) Trading books can be found at amazon.com - traders press.com- barnes and noble, just to name a few. There must be hundreds of websites about T/A. One good one is http://www.incrediblecharts.com/index.htm You can click on *Trading Basics* in the column on the left of their homepage and gather quite a bit of trading info from that page - lots of T/A etc and even some psychology. I am not affiliated with these folks, as a matter of fact the way that I found this website was that someone else on ET posted it. (can't remember who posted it, but thanks to whoever) I think it was funky and vanilla2 that said to remember that the market will always be there tomorrow. I tell myself that on a regular basis. Probably for the same reasons that they do...lol.. JT47319 gave you 3 thresholds (1) survive (2) becoming consistent (3) making/and keeping profits. Patience and Discipline are key to all 3. rtharp reminds you again of your first post:I know for 100%(nothing less or nothing more) that I want to be and that I will be a day trader forever. --- "A lot of people over estimate what they can do in a year - but heavily under estimate what they can do in a decade or 2" You said that this was your life ambition. Treat it as such. Start now if you want to, just go slow and trade small. Whatever you decide to do career wise - it takes time, hard work and some trials and tribulations to gain enough experience to become good and seasoned at what you do. With trading, the trials can cost a fair amount of cash and that is why these traders are telling you to take it slow. So go ahead and get your feet wet and when you complete your first trade, remember that 'that one' was merely the first of many and that the market doesn't care whether you made a gain or a loss or that you were even there. Plan your work - work your plan - define your entry, your stop, and your profit target (or method of taking profit). (before you put your trade on) Stick to your plan - avoid revenge trading and remember that the market will be there tomorrow and the next day. I like vhehn's idea about, "forget about it for now. use your degree to earn a living. trade long term or trade at night to satisfy your trading dreams (you can trade almost 24 hours a day now). if you ever get good at trading you can always go fulltime." But I allready know that you will not be following his suggestion, as good as it is, you have that itch..lol... Hopefully that itch will not cost you tons. It doesn't have to. Discipline and Patience are key. PS. What Jesse Livermore did in the 1920's was important. Get that reminiscences book and any other books on J.L. and read them over and over and pay close attention to the fact that the man made millions - yes millions - when millions were worth much more than they are today. Also pay attention on what not to do = giving the millions back.
WOW. plumlazy, what a great concluding post to a great thread. I am going to print this thread out for further study and as ElectricSavant suggested, "Review your log. As the first page in your log....copy your opening post and come back and read it after the a time. ", I am going to start a Trading Log today and going to glue my original post to it.
Yep, buy, borrow, checkout, steal, rent every trading book you can get your hands on and just read .. that is your occupation for the next year. Keep in mind that 90% of the books will be utterly useless, but you don't know which ones will produce you a gem til you try them all.