I am not sure if other forum members would agree with me, but I think that there is difference between demo and real account. I would agree with Jfranco that there is a lot more emotions involved in trading on real account, probably because of the fact that here you can make real losses which hurts
Quite right, I agree 100%. The carrot and the stick are powerful learning aids, and paper trading offers no rewards and no consequences. But there are other differences as well from live trading. Order execution is very different. You can buy in to crazy big positions in paper trading on even low float stocks. There are no liquidity issues. Your orders aren't visible to others. You aren't exposed to the real market and real market forces and real market skulldiggery. The conventional wisdom is to paper trade for about 6 months before live trading. The idea is you won't be throwing money away as you learn. The problem is when you start live trading you will think you know how to trade, but you won't. You won't know how to live trade but you will think everything is okay and you got this, but why, oh why, is your money evaporating like that? And why is your broker taking so long to open or close positions? Why do you get stopped out so much? Why does the market seem to be targeting you and picking on you personally? So I suggest an alternate route. First, learn how to use a stock screener. Learn to find stocks with high relative volume and high volatility, or big gappers or big movers in the $5 to $10 stocks. Learn to recognize key patterns and how to look at a chart and determine if a stock is trending or breaking out or in a reversal situation or what not, and identify support and resistance levels, and get an idea of how volume and price work together. Read, study, a lot during this phase. Learn to interpret what you see in the charts. Learn to make a good watch list. Then, paper trade just long enough to learn how to use the platform. A couple of weeks, a month, even. Then start trading live, small positions of $5 to $10 stocks. Initially, no more than one open position at a time, no more than 100 shares, careful stop placement. Don't try to make a bunch of money. Try to expose yourself to the market and not lose a bunch. Learn how to manage risk and live to trade another day. Sooner or later, something on your watch list will move so strongly and predictably that you will be able to ride it up (or down) with the mob, and make a proper day's wages by lunch time. If you can buy in to a trend when the stock dips a bit on it's way up, and sell when the trend shows weakness, you can make money. If you can chip away at a stock by buying at support and selling at resistance, and vice versa, then you can make money. If you can identify a breakout and ride it to the next resistance level, you can make even way more money if you catch it, which cn be tricky. If you can identify a bull flag momentum situation and buy during consolidation and ride the next flagpole up, you can make crazy money, when you do catch it. I suggest learning a little bit about all those situations and strategies, but concentrate on only a couple of them at first. Bull (or bear) flag momentum to me was the simplest one to learn, and speaking for myself, I put it into play my first day of live trading and made darn good money that day. I just couldn't help it. It wasn't a grind. It was a money machine and I was a bulldozer scooping it into a pile. You could do worse as a newbie than to just watch for this setup and not trade until you see it, even if it takes weeks of watching the scanner before you catch one. Like this. A tough trader with big gonads could double a small account easy on action like this. A newbie could easily make a couple bucks per share in just three plays. Look how volume and price action indicate the play. This is a setup for a newb to watch for. BTW this was my first stock to live trade, on the day I traded it. Scanner was TradingView, which I highly recommend. TradingView guys, please send me my endorsement check now. LOL A newb could have played the 5min chart starting at 10 and made his three trades and done well. But look what happened overnight! And the next day. Too bad, if you were PDT restricted like I was, huh? A total newb swinging a $25k account could have tripled it. The momentum was unstoppable, liquidity was insane, and you could almost have done no wrong. This shows the importance of a good scanner and knowing how to use it. This was a good find, and finding it early instead of later made a tremendous difference. Without a good scanner, you are LOST. A a big win or two will pay for a lot of small losses from grinding away in trend plays or mean reversion plays. Everybody loses for a while. For some it is a little while. For some it is a long while. But while learning to trade, you don't want to also be learning how to place orders or close positions or how to program hotkeys or where to click or not to click, or what warnings it is cool to disable. You can lose a lot of money making operator errors that have nothing to do with your understanding of market action. And so, a couple weeks of paper trading IMHO are essential. Very essential. A half year could be counterproductive. A month might be just right.
no mentor needed,You need to put in lot of hours and stare at the charts, atleast 2-3 years to get some semblance, that you understand a little of whats going on. Once past that then you need a strategy that will be profitable another year or two to find out what works for you, then you need to understand the psychological and emotional side of trading , another year i fear. so in all to be some what consistent profitable trader you would need to invest around 4-6 years. A mentor cannot help you, as it will be your own journey and you will need to do all the walking on your own. Good luck. Also within the 4-6 years hopefully market will expose you to new experiences that will make you despair and other times will make you feel like king of world. In all it will humble you then you will understand what trading is all about and how nothing is constant in market yet everything is repeat of everything that has happened in past since a century ago.
Update: In the time since this thread was posted I have been doing a lot of reading and seriously considering whether or not trading is something I want to do. I also placed a few trades every week trying to apply what I’m learning and had been up a small amount. Today I made a bad trade on too big of a position size and lost nearly 10% of my account. You live and you learn, I guess.
Unless you really really want it, stay far away. Just live a simple average life. But if your willing to go through things similar to what Jesse Livermore did, then by all means start putting some skin in the game.
Trading is character building, it will push you to your limits, trial by fire, boot camp for producing a good all round perspective on life, throws; beliefs, hope, superstition, prayers out, none of that works.