Business

Starting Your Trading Career

There are many ways in which you can kick off your trading career. However, doing in step by step will boost your chances of succeeding.  As they say, failing to plan and planning to fail. To make it clear, it’s your career as a trader and not as an employee of a broker. For example, a career with eToro may mean working for them (read more here: wikitoro.org/etoro-careers) and this post is not about that but rather as a client or trader in particular. The following are the steps you should take  when starting your trading career.

Opening an Account for Trading

This is the first obvious step. You must find a good online broker and open a trading account. You may already have a personal account, but it’s not such a bad idea to keep your trading account separate.

Try to familiarize yourself with the account interface and take advantage of the free trading tools and research that are offered exclusively to clients

Many brokers offer free virtual trading, and you might want to take advantage of that.

Improving Your Knowledge

Read different financial articles and books about the stock market, and find some webinars and website tutorials.

There’s a ton of information waiting for you out there, and many of them are free or very cheap to access.

It’s also wise to not focus on a single part of the trading game. Rather, study everything about that market that hits your fancy. There may be some ideas or concepts that may feel irrelevant this time, but they may be useful in the future, when you’re gearing up your trading career.

Your broad and widely comprehensive market background will be very useful for you over and over again.

Analyzing the Market

Study how technical analysis works and check the price charts in all time frames. Studying fundamental analysis might also be of great help because it tracks growth curves and revenue streams.

However, most trades make their cheese by price action that diverges sharply from underlying fundamentals. When you study charts, you also study the art of prediction.

Prices can go in different ways. It can trade sideways for a period of time, or it can turn wildly up or down. Time horizon are also of importance, as two traders can observe the same asset’s movements but have different interpretations because they are looking at them at different timeframes.

Practicing the Act of Trading

The best way to practice the act of trading is through paper trading, or virtual trading. This practice lets newbie traders follow the real-time market actions, market buying and selling decisions that form the outline of a theoretical performance record.

It often involves the use of a stock market simulator which provides the look and feel of a real exchange. Using this simulator, you can make a lot of trades with different holding periods and strategies.  You can then analyze the results for obvious flaws.

Further Learning and Practice

Although paper trading is already an excellent teacher, you can still learn more from other methods of education.

Trading classes, whether online or not, can be good. You can find classes for novice, advanced, and pros. At the same time, there are more specialized seminars, which are usually facilitated by professional traders, that can provide valuable insights into the overall market and specific investment strategies.