In my opinion, don't waste your time learning automating trading. Why I say this? Because you currently have no trading ideas/plans/strategies to program and back test, because you have no day trading experiencing watching the charts.
Manual trade for now to learn the art/psychology/business of trading. Do the automate stuff once you have a consistent way of making money if you want to.
This advice is mostly pointless.
I rarely trade manually. I define manually as drawing lines on charts and using those. In fact I have a significantly higher variance trying to trade against my systems that I develop in a mathematically verifiable way (most TA indicators have no statistically significant predictive power over the long term). I started writing programmed strategies and manually trading them on a small account. This wasn't a need to "learn the market psychology". My broker wouldn't give me access to the FIX API with an account under 100,000!
My background and training are in Computer Science and Mathematics. It made sense immediately to me to develop a way to systematically trade automated or semi-manually (if my broker didn't give me execution access...sometimes execution can be expensive). I generally use statistical models which don't have clean representations on charts.
These days one should just learn automated trading or there is still advantage of manual trading?
As I mentioned above if you have the technical chops and a larger account automated trading is fine, in fact it should be preferred. It forces you to cleanly define your rules to a computer for entry and exit. This is important, it's something the best manual traders can do but the average trader cannot. You don't really "learn automated trading". Automated trading is an extension of one of two fields:
1. Technical Analysis: Automated signal generation based on TA tools.
2. Statistical Analysis: Automated signal generation based on statistical tools.
You can implode your account very quickly if you're not a good programmer or have unclear rules.
What is the best way to learn day trading ...do I need a mentor ..if yes where do I find one?
Don't pay anyone. You can post your results here but even that is pointless. Use metrics such as Sharpe and Maximum Drawdown to determine how good you are. Compare your results to large hedge funds (ex. The Quantum Fund maintains a Sharpe Ratio of somewhere between 0.42 and 0.6, the S&Ps Sharpe Ratio has rarely exceeded 1) and CTAs.
If you aren't a successful swing trader however you are going to struggle day trading. Consider that most technical indicators and statistical analysis begin to fall apart at lower timeframes. You'll have people here claiming the minute bars are great but you are trading mostly against noise. Statistically, high frequency (bars lower than 30m) is difficult to consistently trade correctly.
Let's say you aren't an accomplished swing trader. This means your pattern recognition in the higher more established time frames isn't good. Patterns are more statistically significant at periods from the daily and higher. So if in this more statistically favorable environment you are not good you won't be able to day trade properly. You'll be gambling. Many people make a living on gambling but when they blow up, they blow up big.
