Hi smallcapgrowth,
First of all, greetings and all of the best to you.
You already have shown traits that (I believe) are necessary for success in trading. The understanding that you need to put in the hours studying. You need to practice and know what you are going to do in all scenarios in advance. You need to follow your rules.
Books that I would put at the top of your list, all by Howard B. Bandy:
Foundations of Trading.
Quantitative Technical Analysis. This is the most important book.
Mean Reversion Trading Systems
These books are most useful for people who are willing to put in the work to learn some programming and testing skills. These book give you access to AmiBroker and Python code.
Subscribe to Stocks and Commodities mag.
http://traders.com/. I use it to learn new techniques and get ideas.
Join Meetups in your area. Where I am, Boston has lots of useful meetups. Meet successful and unsuccessful traders. Learn and discuss ideas and sources of useful information.
Look at the Hall of Fame threads in Elite Trader. (people like NoDoji, hint)
Get a platform to test and practice with. There are many that are probably good enough. For testing I like AmiBroker (inexpensive and maybe the best). Free to use Ninja Trader. Others with lots of support; TradeStation, Think or Swim.
Open a brokerage account with a good paper trading system. I use Interactive Brokers as do the majority of experienced traders. The paper trading is really good in my experience. I have often run the same (automated) strategies on both real and paper trading accounts with very similar results. The results pretty much average out for me. I have even had short entries take minutes to hours to execute, the same as my real trading account.
Don't trade with real money until you prove to yourself that your system(s) work. When you start trading with real money, remember you don't have to buy 100 shares. You can buy one or ten, whatever makes sense.
As someone already pointed out, although there are similarities to gambling (by that I mean your style of gambling, which I don't consider "gambling"), there are major differences. Kelly is, in my opinion, not appropriate for position sizing. You will learn a (IMO) much better way in Dr. Bandys books.
There are many way to make money in trading. I am convinced that most can be made to work. Keep in mind that having a diverse group of methods can smooth your equity curve greatly. Also, as you progress, think Market Neutral. I think Wykoff and its derivatives are useful to study.
Online courses. (Lots of programming, statistics, R, etc.)
https://www.coursera.org/
https://www.udacity.com/
https://www.edx.org/
https://www.udemy.com/courses/ (cheap if you wait for email specials. $10 - $15)
Podcasts and Videos
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXtFh3dcGQ1wfORL1tZxKrQ
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoY3-SzCItjOB9_6JINRXOQ
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQH3d17HKuhp-bg_z8ourNQ
For you musical enjoyment
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCORIeT1hk6tYBuntEXsguLg
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbK6S8jFtYZ3UnPhWRIJ0bA
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqatJlFAhRboXrFNAG0rsDA I love ELP
Other unrelated stuff I like
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7DdEm33SyaTDtWYGO2CwdA
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7_gcs09iThXybpVgjHZ_7g
There are some people that contribute useful information on these forums, I use the ignore feature a lot.
Take care,
-David