Quote from Sarvise:
Johnny,
I wouldn't normally recommend to anyone to quit work/school to start learning to trade, but hey, if you wanna take a year off from work/college while you live at your parents, I don't see what the problem is (just as if you wanted to take a year off to go travel, learn to play the sax or solve world hunger). At the very least you will have and educational experience (which is what college is meant to be anyway).
On top of candy's advice regarding staying away from the forex bucketshops (trade Globex futures instead) and if I may add something to PipProphet's excellent advice...
a) Start the house with the foundations. You seem to be fluent in English, which is certainly an starting advantage not fully appreciated by those whose mother tongue is English (try finding trading books in Norwegian), good for you.
b) Next I would do some speed/fast/photo reading course (a good book and lots of practice will do, don't waste your money on over-priced seminars for executives).
c) Do not read any book, STUDY them, flip over them, then read them, then take notes, re-read them, etc. Almost nobody does this, nobody is going to make them take an exam, after all... Wrong... Mr. Market will test you and he is a demanding teacher. Most people will tell you that what you need is screen time and you certainly do, but first studying the theory before you get too hung up on following the market tick by tick (and believe me, trading even if it's just in a demo account is addictive, way more when you start trading with real money when you will have the feeling that if you don't trade one day because you're studying or researching you're losing money and will miss the BIG move) will prove invaluable later for two reasons: i) you will know what to look for; ii) at some point you will realize that much of what you read is garbage - at least that's my view regarding most technical analysis other than price, volume and open interest and basic support/resistance - but when (not if) you find yourself losing money you will know that the problem does not lie in not knowing enough about the Elliott wave, the flying star in the middle of the night pattern or not having bought some "proprietary" indicator from some scam artist (and you will find many in this and other forums). It takes years for most people to become profitable because they don't have a solid foundation, so when they lose they go back and do some study and then by chance make some money and think they've got it so they stop studying and then they start losing again and think they must have missed something so they go back to do some more study and on and on... Get it right the first time, study everything you can lay your hands on: Fibonacci, market profile, Elliott wave and Gann, oscillators, level II, economic indicators, seasonal patterns, you name it. Three months studying full time (>50 hours a week) should cut it IF you're good at studying and an efficient reader, but if you need longer don't let it bother you. Do it first, do it right and you'll only have to do it once.
d) While you're studying, learn Excel inside out, knowing what you can do with it will help you avoid trading from the cuff and will also prove invaluable regarding money management. Some programming won't hurt you.
e) Until you make your first 100,000 do not pay anyone to coach you, then you'll be in a position to recognize who can help you to take your trading to the next level and who couldn't trade shit.
f) Open a demo account and watch - only watch - the market for a whole month. Start with a broad group of markets and see how they relate to each other. Then, once you are tuned to the rhythm of the market, start narrowing down to one or max two contracts that you wanna trade. Watch - just watch, but with intensity - that product/s for another full month.
g) Drill the contract (in demo, of course) for another month, that is, don't try to trade a great or even profitable strategy, your goal should not be to make money just as an athlete's goal in his winner training is not to run fast, but to build a base for later running fast - even if that tires him so much it slows him down for the moment. What do I mean by drill? Try several things: scalping in one direction, trading by stochastics, by crossing moving averages, by anything you can think of, try trading with the trend, try fading new highs/lows, trade an always in strategy reversing instead of closing positions, try to capture every move, every tick, in every direction. Trading (again, in the simulator) minimum size you will lose in one month more money that a carpenter can possibly hope to make in a lifetime, but that makes no difference. Your purpose here is not to make fictitious money so you can impress anyone, your goal is to put in thousands and thousands of trades so that i) the movement of your chosen market becomes second nature to you ii) you can place trades in and out in your sleep iii) you get to know your platform inside out.
h) Then make a tentative trading plan and start trading it in demo, making any necessary adjustments until you have something that you feel 100% confident about.
i) Trade it in demo until you lose most of your money. Go back to h) and repeat until you have a trading plan, a system and the discipline required to trade profitably in a CONSISTENT MANNER.
j) Then trade it some more.
k) Then trade live with minimum size and when you hit an x loss switch to demo mode. Do this until you don't get red in the face when you lose money live and make money in demo.
l) If you're human, stop when you've lost 10% of your capital. Go back to h, i or whatever.
m) The second, the third or the fourth time you come around (or the first if you're super-human) and trade live as consistently as you were trading in demo mode, start increasing your size as per your plan. Make sure you make regular withdrawals before you get too cocky (you will) and blow your account.
n) Repeat last steps until you don't know what to do with so much money (hopefully - I'm not there yet)
o) When you're filthy rich, thank PipProhet and me by introducing us to your hot female Norwegian friends (in their twenties, please), my, oh, my...
It's way tougher, harder, and above all much more frustrating and exasperating than it looks (after all, just by flipping a coin you have a 50% chance, right?), but if you can make it through the <b>PROCESS</b> then the sky is the limit.
Best trading,
Jorge
PS Sorry for the long post, I just wish I could go back in time and save myself a whole lot of time
Errr... Edit: ThePipProphet is a family man (you lucky), so I'm gonna have to handle those Norwegian girls on my own
Awesome Jorge!
A huge smile arose on my face while reading this excellent post.
This is truly the kind of advice that I hoped receiving.
If you don`t mind, I would love to ask you some questions per private message as most people writing in this thread do not seem very interested in the actual education needed to succed in this.
PS: We`ll see about those Norwegian girls!
