As Pboyles has kindly linked to my blog I should at least give you my personal thoughts.
I have spent a good chunk of money in the past looking for a way to trade that suits me and yes I continue to spend money. However, I have been to Uni, I have my own business and I have a certain amount of money to use/lose/waste/invest/bet/retrain/spend on mentoring and any other way you can think of to spend money in this particular industry.
My only advice is to meet someone face to face. This is really easy to do and there are many examples of people who are willing to meet you. If you go through a web site initially you'll always have an element of doubt. If you meet them personally you can diminsh a lot of doubt very quickly.
I chose LST because they are a legit company. There are many other legitimate Trading companies out there too. You just need to pound the streets and find them.
Or you need to get an introduction through a friend/chance meeting with a trader. My sister has friends at Marex Spectron. I had never heard of them but she happened to mention to a friend who she new worked in the city that I had an interest in trading. Hey presto he's a contact that I now have on LinkedIn and has already offered me an interview should I ever want to be a full time trader.
Not that I would be much use to them yet 
. Who knows where that gets me in the future but a chance meeting or an introduction can get you on a path to a mentor/trading career. You just need to put yourself in a place where you'll meet these people. I don't hold much hope of actually meeting anyone from this web site face to face. If I did I very much doubt they would be a successful trader.
A mentor can show you a winning strategy in under 60 mins. Doesn't mean you'll understand it, be able to trade it, stick to the rules or never change the rules.
A guy on the internet you've never met can show you a chart, talk you through exactly the same strategy but again, you may not fully understand, be able to trade it, stick to the rules or never change the rules.
I've chosen to go with a mentor that I know I can sit down with should I need to. As I feel it's important to be able to discuss how I trade, my reasons for breaking the rules, my emotions about how the trades are progressing. I like the fact that I can question the validity of a trade, maybe how I should be adapting the trading strategy to my personality. I can discuss position sizes and pip costs.
It's all stuff that reading books didn't work for me. You may have more success with a book.
I wouldn't take anything on this site as gosspel as 99% of the people on here are anonymous to you and will never show you their setups, trading logs, strategies, where they learnt, who they trade for. They are strangers spouting a lot of words that actually have no relevance most of the time and are of little help.
You should definitely look up as many trading companies names as you can and then see where they are in relation to you geographically. Then you should search through the internet looking for peoples views on them. Then you should try and meet someone from a company that you like the sound of.
They may have a graduate training scheme, they may allow you to start as a junior, they may allow you to trade your own money. You wont know until you go and meet them.
Regarding my personal score card, I found it difficult to stick to the rules, I over leveraged and I chased losses. So advice to myself these last couple of months is Stick to the rules, keep the leverage to a minimum.
I have always had a budget set aside to learn a new life skill. I am still no where near spending my budget or being able to say I have a new life skill. When I am making more money out of trading than the day job, then I'll go full time trading. Simples.
Picking an entry is the easy bit. Leaning how to keep hold of your money is the real skill.
