Full Time Trading Guideline
By Lawrence
If you are interested in trading full time, I suggest that you can start by trading part-time first. To be specific, I am not telling you to open a brokerage account and start trading right the way. Instead, I am asking you to follow the Secondary Income Trading Guideline to build a solid part-time trading business first. After all, many successful small businesses are built from part-time pursuits.
If you prefer not to approach trading that way and find chart reading kind of fascinating, you probably have some preconceptions about trading like it requires staring at the charts. If this what you want to do, I will recommend you complete the study of the Trading Success Blueprint first. This should help you correct many of your misconceptions about trading.
It will be difficult for you to write your first trading plan until you have at least given trading a try. So, be prepared to open a trading account but instead of trading real money that you put into the account, use the simulation trading service offered by your brokerage to try out trading first. Treat it as a game in the beginning while you are learning the long list of skills associated with trading. Do not put pressure onto yourself because you do not want to develop bad habits in the early stage of your training.
If you cannot afford to practice trading at a leisure pace in the beginning of the learning stage for various reasons, please choose to follow the part-job approach. Otherwise just the pressure to perform alone would reduce your chance to succeed significantly.
When your basic chart reading skill started to take shape and that you are becoming more confident with your analysis of the charts, you will need to decide whether to pursuit trading the classical way, or my highly disciplined approach as described in TSB. If chart based approach is what you are comfortable with, follow what I wrote in TSB to define the rules of engagement in as much details as possible.
If you find that you have more confidence in trading with clearly defined strategies, your next step is to study mechanical trading.
You should focus on writing a detail trading plan at this point. Keep refining it while you are still in learning mode.
Remember do not proceed with live trading until you have your full trading plan in place. You should not allow yourself to trade with potential scenarios that you have not are not prepared for. When your plan is ready, trade with a sim account until you are comfortable following your own rules without hesitation. After couple of months of practice on the sim account, you can go live trading and re-evaluate your situation in 3 months.
