Choosing tools etc

Strangelydifferent

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Hi
I'm a beginner to trading, hooray! I've spent quite a while reading around here and it seems a very positive place. However for my part, to be frank, I have found it very difficult to move beyond the reading stage. I have about a hundred questions and its hard to know where to start.

I'd be fascinated to understand how folks have dealt with choosing basic trading tools. In fact I think I have already made plenty of assumptions. The LSE gaps down far more, and more often, than it used to a year ago, so swing trading seems particualrly hazardous. I've read the US market is more liquid but they seem to have this strange $25K deposit issue and so I'm not going to put that much cash into a foreign currency account just now, call me lilly livered. Hence all the free end of day services seem innapropriate at the moment.

This leads me to what seems to be a circular problem:
1. Data providers and scanning tools appear expensive (i.e. careful decision)
2. It seems that to choose one requires some assumptions about what timeframes and markets will suit. I think I want to practise day and swing trading in shares but that hardly narrows things much. I still don't know am I going to trade first in the morning in the UK/europe or at the end of the day in the US etc.
3. I don't feel comfortable to make those assumptions yet because I haven't started paper trading (especially to see how I will integrate this with my day job).
4. I haven't started that because it seems that an intraday scanner is pretty vital for even beginning to start to evaluate some trading methods, let alone start practising them.

Any thoughts on where to break the circle?
Cheers
Duncan
 
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