Welcome.
1. Set some goals for your trading keeping in mind your lifestyle and desires. Don't fall prey to the easy goal of "I want a million dollars" or "I want to make a lot of money" Put down how much money you need to live the way you want and get what you want and write it down and write a timeline for acheiving it. You must realize (barring the luck factor rags-to-riches story) that your monetary goal with trading will be directly proportional to the amount of time/work you put into it. So, if you want to be the next Warren Buffet or George Soros or Richard Dennis you will have to put in the 16 hour days 7 days a week the way they did. If however you want to travel around the world and live in different places on a reasonable budget (it's cheaper than you'd think) and don't need a lamborgini or Versaci suit, then don't kill yourself. If you are not congruent with your goal and amount of dedication to trading (or anything) you will end up very unhappy and unsuccessful, you will also lose any sense of balance in your life. Imbalance is fine if you are doing something bigger and better than yourself, all quantum growth requires transitory imbalance, but you must decide this for yourself.
2. Read, Trade, Talk, Read Trade Talk. I love to read. I don't live anywhere for a long time so I don't get to create relationships with other traders too often, so I think that reading is more fruitful for me, but I would like to have more experienced trader friends/mentors as a sound board. But just find a way to get new info and input (then your job is filtering thru it). But do NOT fall into Analysis Paralysis = just reading and demoing, and never risking anything. You will get bored, and not be able to jump on an opportunity that presents itself. But you must also be Patient = don't trade just to trade, if you are impatient, you will find a trade every microsecond (based on different TA ideas) this will kill you. You must figure out the balance between these two forces too Patient = failure, too Impatient=failure.
3. Have fun. If it's not fun you will not keep going. Money is a good motivator, but if you don't like research and studying, you willl not like this job. Also if you get pissed (and oh how easy that is) you will mess up and learn to hate trading.
4. Get some good software. Don't depend on freebies. You get what you pay for. If you are serious about trading get good software and data. This is a personal choice and you will decide which you like thru Trial and Error. I like Tradestation and Metastock, but I also extensively use MS Excel.
5. Forex.com is fine, in fact you should
demo all the brokers you can. They are all so very different. Forex.com has a wireless trading platform that I like, although there is no charting thru it. I like
Metatrader CE for wireless charts, although I haven't tested it's reliability too much. FXCM is good if you have High Speed internet and live in the USA. They answer the phone faster than any other company I deal with and if you can get to the right people, they know a lot. But being a big company they have a good share of imbeciles, but no more than any other broker... actually come to think of it, a lot less (that's why despite my whining I stay with them) CMS is beautiful in theory, horrible in practice. They crash, which = death in trading. And they're software claims greatness but is really just a bug-ridden joke. They have taken ideas from Metastock and Tradestation that are agreat, but it just doesn't work.
Read 1 book on TA
Read 1 book on Money Management
Read 1 book on successful traders or a biography
Read 1 book on Fundamentals / Global Economics
Read 1 book on Systems
Get some software and read it's manual cover to cover and then do some testing and programming in it.
good luck
davidgareau@verizon.net
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