The Oanda idea is a good one. You can, as RCG pointed out, risk the equivalent of a Friday happy hour while testing various strategies and getting some valuable screen time.
I'm leery of indicator-based trading because I studied several of them and backtested several of them and despite the backtesting demonstrating millionaire status within a year, reality never came close (this was automated backtesting).
I was thrilled with the stochastics idea when I discovered it and I had a string of profits for weeks/months, up 40% in three months. I felt invincible (ego) and I held more positions as swing trades, inverting my risk:reward ratio badly when a trade ran against me too far, expecting that there was no way the indicator could be wrong.
I gave back much of my profit and spent a long time starting over, learning price action trading, the advantage of which is you always have a hard line in the sand beyond which the position is closed or reversed (strong risk management) and because you're riding on the coattails of the institutional traders/investors who move price, the expectancy is positive (statistical edge) due to the inertia created by these market participants looking accumulate or distribute large positions.
I now frequently buy new highs and sell new lows even if price is extremely overextended and these are rarely losing trades.
The market is always right. You're new, so here are a few lessons you can have for free instead of blowing your account over them:
If the news is bad and price is going up, either buy or do nothing; if news is good and price is going down, either sell or do nothing.
The trend is your friend. Learn to recognize a trend and how to trade one. If a stock's P/E ratio is ridiculously high and only idiots are buying this POS and only dumbasses are falling for this fake rally and this is nothing but a massive short squeeze, either buy or do nothing. Some of us remember how stupid we thought people were for buying NFLX above $60/share, but it never looked back at $60 and spent the next year and a half rising to top $300 and trade at ridiculous P/E levels despite major headwinds. However, once that parabolic uptrend line finally broke and became resistance, it was the short play of a decade.
If price is totally overextended up or down and the stochastics are fully overbought/oversold and Keltners are in the 7th house and Bollinger aligns with Mars, it's not necessarily the dawning of Age of Acquiring Wealth by positioning yourself against this move.
Learn to recognize the patterns that signal a pullback or trend reversal and only trade counter to the move when price triggers this pullback or reversal. Until you learn to do this, either buy the overbought and sell the oversold or do nothing.
Losing trades are a cost of doing business. A successful business doesn't expect to only produce income without ever paying for rent, utilities, employees, inventory, etc. A successful trader doesn't expect to only produce profitable trades.
If you're a trader who has, so far, only produced profitable trades, you're cutting winners short in order to snare a profit on every trade, and/or you're moving stops to break even in order to prevent any trade from becoming a loser, and/or you're holding losers (and maybe averaging down along the way) until price comes back to at least break even or a small profit. These tactics can work for a long time, convincing you that you've outsmarted the market. In fact, the longer the string of success, the more danger you're in of taking a large or even catastrophic loss.
Mom has spoken
lmao