First off.. you have to decide why you want to trade, other than make money. Do you NEED to make money? If so, go get a job, cuz the need to pay bills will overwhelm you in the early months. If you WANT to make money, and can afford to take 6-12 months to really give yourself a chance to learn, answer this question. Cay you do anything someone else can do, given the same opportunity and tools? If you answered yes, and truly believe it, then you'll succeed, eventually. Your inner self won't allow you to give up.
Forget about a prop desk. You're gonna spend 5K doing some "intensive " training. Then, you're gonna trade the firms money, on a very tight leash. Even at that, you'll probably blow out your account and be gone in a few months or sooner. No way, they let you trade down past your "tuition". Take the 5K, put it into a prop account, with a legit firm, that has good risk management. This will keep you from losing too much too fast. Have them set your daily loss at say $100 to start out. Get a quality pc, at least 2 monitors, more as you progress. Read, Read, READ. Everything trading, your gonna live and breathe trading. Get the books on technical analysis, psychology, methods, read them all. You'll find dozens of indicators, read about them, try to understand how they work, then ignore most all of them. Just use stochastics or macd. They will suffice. Watch EVERY video you can find, youtube is full of them, I'm not recommending any specifics.
Start making some trades, 100 shares at a time. Keep it simple, know how much you're willing to lose, and adhere to that stop. If you want to risk $25...then don't trade AAPL, IBM, XOM, etc. Stay with some less expensive and slower, like MSFT, GE, etc. You're gonna learn by trial and error what works and doesn't. Ask yourself each time, why am I getting in, and when do I plan to get out.
You're gonna break EVERY trading rule known to man, you have no choice. It's human nature, but if you learn from each mistake, you'll be the better for it. Keep reading, learning, everything you can, never assuming that you've learned all there is to know. You're still losing money and don't know why. Your account will dwindle on down, and you'll get discouraged. But every night, you'll read or see something, the same thing you saw 3 months ago, and a light will come on, you'll finally get it. And the confidence will go back up. That process will repeat itself day after day after day, until you sit down one morning, and it all clicks. Sure, you lost your $5K, had to deposit another $5K, lost part of it, but now, you're seeing a lot more green. Chatting with different traders intraday has helped you become more aware of what's going on around you, you've picked small pieces from everywhere you could, to complete your own trading puzzle. You start making a good living, you finally did it. You're one of the 5 out of 100 who succeed at this..the few, the proud, the successful Daytrader.
