Trading For A Living – Pipe Dream Or Actual Possibility?

Posted by admin as shares and stocks

To be able to do trading for a living is a dream of countless part-time traders. One only has to look at the numerous seminars, training sessions and trading bush camps these traders attend to understand how intensely they want to do this. The lifestyle of a full-time trader looks so perfect: you never have to leave your desk, never have to face an angry boss. You can take leave whenever you want. You determine your own salary.

Without the right set of tools, this will stay an elusive dream for all those hapless part-time traders though. Let us take a look at what you will need to make it a reality.

The first prerequisite for a full-time trader is that you have to realize something: you are not actually trading against other traders, or against the market. You are trading against yourself. If you are unable to overcome your inherent weaknesses as a trader, you will never be able to trade successfully over a long period of time.

What exactly does that mean? It means that you can study all the rules, you can intellectually know the right thing to do in every possible set of circumstances. But if you have a tendency to hang on to losing trades in the hope that they will turn around, you will lose money time and again.

The same is true if you do not develop the discipline to let a winning trade ride – to allow it to reach its full potential and make some serious money. Selling winning trades the moment they have made a little money and staying in losing trades forever are the two major causes of failure for newbie traders.

You second important step will be to decide what type of trader you want to be. A day trader, a swing trader or a longer term trader. Day-trading is extremely alluring. You can start with little money, and you can sometimes make a lot of profit in one day. Statistically it is however much more difficult to predict the market movement for a share or a currency during the next 8 hours than to predict it for the next year.

You will also have to decide which market instruments you will be trading in: commodities, shares or currencies. Each one of them will require a different skill set and different tools. They also require a slightly different approach to trading. With share trading you must get intimate with the financial statements of the companies you want to trade in. You have to know the market for their products or services. With currency trading and commodities you have to study the underlying factors causing price movements in these instruments. Things like droughts, surpluses, inflation and interest rates.

The right tools are of course very important as well. To start off with you need knowledge. You need to get familiar with reading financial statements and analysing charts. You need to understand technical indicators, how to use them and how to interpret movements in these indicators

You will also have to sign up with a service that provides you with up to date prices for the market instruments you will be trading in. There are many free services, but they only work if you trade in a longer time frame. If you want to be a day trader you will need access to live prices.

Trading for a living is a noble dream. To make it more than a dream, you need to be able to control your own trading weaknesses and you need the proper tools. You also need a lot of determination and just a little bit of luck…

Are you sick and tired of scraping by at your day job? Why not get into the stock trading and make some real money the smart way… with the guidance of artificial intelligence! Get more info about trading for a living… You can also check the very best stock picking software.