Hello,
I've recently become interested in the world of trading. My knowledge on it was/is pretty much non-existent, so I've been on the hunt for information. All the jargon and complex aspects of it are pretty overwhelming I must say. Honestly I'm not sure where to look, because I feel like everyone and his dog are out to scam me. Hopefully I can learn a thing or two here from people who don't have an agenda.
Cheers.
Hi
I hesitate to offer advice as I've been trading for only 8 months and have yet to become successful at it. Perhaps though my growing pains are sufficiently recent for me to make some useful comments.
There are a lot of sources of information out there (and people who want your money) and the two main objectives I would have thought are (a) to keep your money for your trading account and (b) to find some structure in all of the information.
[I confess I spent quite a lot of money for a weekend's course with Knowledge to Action back in April. You will find a lot of people on these forums who would claim that makes me an idiot. Whilst they could be right, I would say I learnt a lot and for my money got 2 days of training, 90minutes of individual coaching and a CD-rom version of the course. The main thing was it got me started and gave me some basis on which to start to weed out wheat from chaff with the enormous amount of stuff available on line. I am NOT making a case for you to spend that amount of money. Make no mistake, the courses offer no magic strategies that guarantee success and are often, it seems, focussed on trending markets (remember those? perhaps they will return some day). If you talk to most people learning to trade the message is you need to work very hard at learning to be a trader and learning the reasons NOT to take a trade.
Start by understanding "account management": this essentially means always placing a stop loss so that you NEVER EVER lose more than 1% of your account and, painful though it would be, after 10 straight losses you still have 90% of your account. If the account dwindles, your 1% also dwindles so that in theory you can go on for years losing money!! If it was easy, the drop-out rate would not be so astronomically high - of the 8 people in my original "trading-buddy" group from the course, I am only aware of three who are still trading and I have heard figures of 80% drop-out in 9 months. Now I am not trying to put you off, just to say, don't expect it to be easy. I still find it truly fascinating and like most areas of learning, the more you know, the more you realise you don't know.
I'm getting a bit off target - you asked about where to learn. See if your local library has any books on the subject, my local one did - that's free. Also free are many "webinars" - these are of variable quality and varying start-times (US EST times mean very late nights) but again they are free and they do tend to reinforce certain basic sensible ideas (they often then try to sell you things vut it's easy to say No). If you open an account with someone (either a demo account or a real money one - and I won't get into that argument at the moment) then most trading platforms offer both charting software AND training programs. Finally, there are some basic learning articles with T2W - these are pretty good and are probably as good a starting point as anywhere. The forums here are a bit frightening in that they are so big and it isn't always easy, especially as a beginner, to find out straight-forward answers to basic questions. But it's always worth asking.
Hope that helps. No doubt others will have their own panacea for progressing from beginner to intermediate to master.........in which case I will avidly read these.
Happy trading
John
