Trading

[jassielarry]

Hi All,

Just wondering where or how people started out when trading. Did you do a trading/technical analysis course or something and where? Or did you just start of small playing trades and learning as you go along?

[DogNo1]

Do you want to trade or to invest? There is a difference. There is a wealth of information on the web. I literally can't count the number of sites that offer trading and investing instructions and advisories. It's a multi-trillion dollar business if you include the value of futures that are traded. Read through the various online offerings and I'm sure that you'll find some that you like.

[iluvbeaches]

You can't learn the psychology with a demo account and books like ta for dummies. Spend some time learning how to read charts/candlesticks, use difference analysis software, watch YouTube videos etc. then open a real account and use cfd for leverage. It's hard but you will figure it out.

Don't trust the craze trading programs sold on the Internet they are over optimized to show a high hit ratio and profit factor.

Very good point about investing or trading. Investing you focus on the fundamentals of a company while traders go for noise, follow trends and market sentiment.

Investopedia is a good start to understand terminology. Lots of click bait articles but useful start. Watch software vids from ig, cmc, interactive traders, Etc

[Dario]

Wish you good luck. If you're going to invest, it's going to be a long term affair. I think the ones who really make money do it in day trading.

I opted for day trading and I don't regret it. But be prepared to lose quite some money during the first months. It's learning money. Everybody will pay that. Even the gurus did.

I never read any advice "professionals" offer for money. I do my own research and it pays off.

.

There is a lot of money to be made in day trading, but equally you can lose money very fast. I'm not talking about common stock, but even in common stock. I give you a good advice: start trading first for a few months without opening an account, just pretend you're trading. You will find out that you'll be making lots of mistakes in the beginning and you will be happy you didn't invest your money for real.

Good homework is very important, it's a great help, but doesn't necessarily guarantee you any gains. When you think this particular stock is gonna go up tomorrow, it might doesn't move and when you expect it the least, it's shooting up. You've gotta have your eyes everywhere at all times during trading. The Thai market is a great market, warrants and derivatives are at times very volatile. Gains of 50% or more during one trading day are not uncommon in the SET, but it's a long and winding road to be able to reap those gains. But once you get there and are able to jump in and out, both at the right time, it'll be rewarding.

Edited May 1, 2014 by Dario

[chainarong]

You don't say what you are trading , if you are doing FX currency trading you will need to have along term trading experience , if you are going down this path before you loose lots of money with indicators , robots, any get rich scheme, etc , Google, learn to trade Price action fx, that should bring up some sites that handle FX, I do FX and I only use price action , Goodluck whatever you do.

[fletchsmile]

I started when the UK govt was privatising national assets. These were more or less guaranteed to go up, as the government couldn't afford to not let them be profitable. So started out on low risk transactions with good odds in my favour.

From there I read books, newspapers, newsletters (no internet then) etc. I then branched into holding normal shares where your transactions depend on you not a government making sure people usually don't lose out. The first one I bought I withdraw about 200 pounds from my bank account (profit from privatisations) and walked cash in hand to a stockbroker in town, went in and asked to buy some shares in my chosen stock at a limit price. The stockbroker was very polite in explaining it didn't quite work like that, explained about trading dates and settlement periods, and I'd get a contract note in the post and settle after that. They must have had a good laugh.

From there I just read more and more and learnt also by trial and error. Then along came the 1987 crash and my first real experience that stocks could go significantly down as well as up. I also started a career in accountancy which was a great technical background, and then moved into other finance areas.

These days on the internet there is a wealth of information, and that's probably where I'd start today. Fund managers and brokers have some very good free info on their websites. I'd recommend taking a look at Hargreaves Lansdown's site

http://www.hl.co.uk/news/free-investment-and-pension-guides#g1

Personally I'd start with the fundamentals first rather than day trading. I prefer investing to trading

Educate yourself and take it slowly. When you set out on this exciting journey it's easy to get caught up in the emotional rollercoaster. Two of many possible tips:

1) Take it easy and make small trades which are a small percentage of the money you have allocated. In trading in particular its all too easy to get carried away and bet too big. I use the word bet, as for an inexperienced trader that's probably closer to the mark

2) Don't average down. Be prepared to accept your trade didn't work out as expected and move on to other trades by cutting your losses. Buying more of a falling stock for novice traders in particular can soon end up having bet more than expected and things spiraling. There's a natural tendency to want to be right and not admit you got the trade wrong. Ignore that tendency. The market knows much more than you when you're starting out.

Don't forget to have your emergency money for life's up and downs set aside, and consider investing in unit trust/ mutual funds alongside, so at least you are building some core wealth, and not just making losing bets/ trades until you get the hang of things.

Cheers

Fletch

Edited May 1, 2014 by fletchsmile

[DogNo1]

That's good advice from fletchsmile. I'd like to repeat the advice of one poster: some (most?) advisory services cherry-pick their data and report their winning trades and neglect to include their losing trades. I've found that some of them won't admit that some of their trades went south. Avoid like the plague advisories that tell you that you can make a large amount of money such as $44,316 in just ten days. Also, most day traders go broke. It is not easy to make money in securities. Keep your trades small and cautious. After you've had a couple of winning trades, it's easy to become overconfident and impressed with your own cleverness and then suffer a big loss. Personally, none of my initial investments made within the past few years has been larger than 3% of my total portfolio although some have now grown larger than that. A pretty good advisory service that many people like is the Motley Fool, although even with them you have to be careful. It's easy to paint a rosy picture if you say a portfolio has gained 22% in the past three years but don't mentioned that it lost 50% in 2008. One very deceptive practice is to declare losses and gains as being equal. They're not. If you lose 50% on a stock, it must gain 100% before you're back to where you started. In other words, losses are difficult to recover from. The strategy should be to limit them. Good luck.