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Strategies & Market Trends : Trading For A Living -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cool who wrote (29)	5/21/1998 7:35:00 AM
From: Turboe	Respond to of 1729

Thanks...

To: cool who wrote (29)	5/21/1998 8:46:00 AM
From: Ed Herlihy	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1729

Almost all services offer free or very low cost 1 month trials. Be sure to look at the long term cost before diving in. The biggest question in trading for a "living" is identifying what your trading "expenses" really are and how this compares to the high risk capital that you will USE to trade with. Most suggest that this ratio should be 50 to 1. I.e 50K in capital can afford 1K in monthly trading expenses. IMHO, the up front training cost (of paper trading for atleast 2-3 months) is perhaps the highest cost of all. Naturally, the balance of the "profits" made each month must also support your normal living expenses. so ofcourse you cannot trade with an amount of $$$ that is equal to one year's salary, unless you plan to clear 100% in profits. Real time Level II, streaming quotes, real time news and good scanning software all add up to $300-500/month by my best estimates. Obviously, I have been using lower cost alternatives to train with. The biggest problem is that paper trading cannot test the use of limit orders or shorts, because too much market dynamics involved are not tested with paper trading. The most important choice is the broker. Most firms have little respect for "high volume traders" with less than $10,000 in capital and some will only permit daytrading under special circumstances. They get too tired of all the complaints about "failed exectutions" on limits orders and get frustrated with inexperienced traders who have litte or no concept of the daytrading market. Yes, the whole system is biased against the small inexperienced traders and the mm's are very savy folks and who know how to whipsaw and scalp the little guy. When I get most of these questions resolved then I wil be able to better answer the question...can I make a living trading. Also, this thread needs to decide whether to focus on "daytrading" or other forms short term position trading, because they involve almost 2 completely different approaches to the task at hand. At this point I seem to be heading to position trading as the safer alternative.