Beginner question for making quick money

[Trembling Hand]

For the original poster. My advice would be to work on consolidating the new position you are in rather than trying to move away as fast as possible from where you have just left. Even as appealing as taking another step is sometimes you have to build the foundations up a little before you add another level.

If not you may find some of the problems that tripped you up to make you homeless are trigged as you move up the ladder. I'm not saying slow and steady. But consolidate and attack.

 

[Assassin]

Thanks for the advice everyone. I think I'll put the 4k out of my mind for the rest of the year and just concentrate on putting away as much money as I can and learn as much as possible from reading and asking questions on here and playing the ASX game and the re-evaluate at the beginning of next year.

 

[Ashsaege]

Thanks for the advice everyone. I think I'll put the 4k out of my mind for the rest of the year and just concentrate on putting away as much money as I can and learn as much as possible from reading and asking questions on here and playing the ASX game and the re-evaluate at the beginning of next year.

Sounds good! You should also download some demo trading accounts. GFT has a good one, but you will get some phone calls from their salesmen.

 

[Mr J]

Trembling Hand is spot on here, but congratulations for making a start from the lowest possible base - respect. But quick money equals high risk. How much will it hurt you to lose that 4k in short order?

Define "quick money". A high volume short-term trader can make quite a lot in a short time, without much capital. TH's nothing to something thread is a good example, although a little extreme.

1. Yes, you should be watching the market every day and constantly throughout the day if you want to gain an understanding of it.

Maybe to understand the finer details, but markets as a whole aren't hard to understand, and don't require constant attention.

The sharemarket isn't just an ATM, you have to work for your money. Sadly alot of people don't realise this

I wouldn't go as far to say that it is work. It's like taking lollipops from kids, and watching to make sure you do it when their parents aren't around.

Thanks for the advice everyone. I think I'll put the 4k out of my mind for the rest of the year and just concentrate on putting away as much money as I can and learn as much as possible from reading and asking questions on here and playing the ASX game and the re-evaluate at the beginning of next year.

Good idea.

 

[Sunder]

My experience is that for the first year or two trading, you have better odds of counting a 6 card deck blackjack table at a casino - I'm serious about that.

Even if you've paper traded for a while before you use real money, emotions get in the way of proper discipline. It helped having my fiance constantly ask how the shares were going, and whether I had tripped any trading signals, and if I had, why hadn't I acted on them - or why I had acted without a trading signal.

Good luck.

 

[nomore4s]

Define "quick money". A high volume short-term trader can make quite a lot in a short time, without much capital. TH's nothing to something thread is a good example, although a little extreme.

An experienced trader maybe but I don't think the OP is anywhere near that stage yet, for the OP to try to trade like that would carry alot of risk I would've thought.

There would only be a very small % of traders that can do what TH can do even to a lesser degree - and to get to that stage requires plenty of hard work & time and probably blowing a few accounts in the process.

I wouldn't go as far to say that it is work. It's like taking lollipops from kids, and watching to make sure you do it when their parents aren't around.

To get to any competent level in the market does require work & experience.

 

[Aussiest]

It's like taking lollipops from kids, and watching to make sure you do it when their parents aren't around.

Hmm Mr J. Lol. But, if you manage to get some lollips, don't forget to share them around with your friends here at ASF :

 

[Mr J]

I just don't think what I do is hard work. I know what I like, and if I see it I'll place the trade. There's not much thought going on, just pattern recognition. The hard work is probably changing personality to be suitable for trading (discipline, patience, emotional strength etc), but I took care of that well before I started trading.

To get to any competent level in the market does require work & experience.

I may not meet your definition of competent, but I'm profitable, and it wasn't due to a great deal of work or experience. Maybe some methods require a lot of effort and experience, while others don't. Mine certainly doesn't, although experience will refine it.

I'm not suggesting that trading is easy for everyone, just that it is not necessarily hard work and doesn't necessarily require a large amount of time before one becomes profitable. Everyone seems to suggest it, and it just isn't true for all.

But, if you manage to get some lollips, don't forget to share them around with your friends here at ASF

My lollipops are just following trends, planning to enter just after a retracement ends. That is my strategy, and it is that simple. It may not work for everyone, but for me it is a natural and simple method that takes little time or experience.

 

[Aussiest]

Hmm, i think the 'work' in trading comes from learning your money managment, that stop losses actually exist, and perhaps studying the interplay of economic data and human psychology (ie, what do people react to?). If trading short term, perhaps the announcements aren't as important, but i think there is a sort of practice of familiarity that needs to take place before one can trade competently.

Eg, it is experience that would teach somebody to get out of a losing trade quickly. A less experienced trader might not have the gumshen to do this, hence blowing up their account sooner.

You probably developed a great deal of self control and emotional resilience during your card playing days Mr J. I think that these things need to be developed by a trader as well. Just my

 

[Mr J]

You probably developed a great deal of self control and emotional resilience during your card playing days Mr J.

I won't deny it. My previous gambling activities have allowed me to slot into trading quite comfortably, but I still believe that trading itself can be quite simple. Having the discipline, patience, tolerance, responsibility etc is something else altogether. I needed quite a bit of experience to truly appreciate all of that, but possibly because I didn't have anyone to drill home the importance of these. It also doesn't change the fact that what I do is very simple :.

 

[Krusty the Klown]

Don't forget to read as many books on the subject as you can find, you don't have to follow the advice in all of them, but it should give you some perspective.

 

[Aussiest]

It also doesn't change the fact that what I do is very simple :.

But, wouldn't you say that you had to study / watch the market for a while to establish the sort of patterns you'd like to trade

 

[Mr J]

But, wouldn't you say that you had to study / watch the market for a while to establish the sort of patterns you'd like to trade

Not really, because I used the same basic concepts in sportsbetting. I fell into that thinking in sportsbetting very quickly after I decided to stop using a service (a legit service) and started concentrating on only making my own bets. It never took any work on my part, I just thought it up and went along with it.

 

[Assassin]

So today I submitted an application and sent off the signed paperwork to open an account with CommSec. I'll use this mostly for the market tools and use it alongside the ASX game and get comfortable with it before using it when I invest my own money next year.

Is there anything else I should organise before I start? I've been trying to look at the education classes on the ASX site but none of them are working which is frustrating me a little bit.

I don't know if I'm trying to make too much happen too quickly. But even though I'm a lot better off than I was, I'm still struggling to get my head around making the bigger things I need to sort out happen like starting a career and making some money to try and clear the debt I left when things crashed out a couple of years ago.

Did anyone here ever have like a mentor type of person to help you through share trading at the beginning? I had an idea today to submit something like an ad in the Fin Review newspaper to ask for someone to send me an email with advice from those who have built up some wealth and built successful careers, but I found out that the Fin Review doesn't have a classifieds type of thing so this idea is a difficult one to make happen. Is there anywhere someone can go to try and find something like this or even somewhere to just get advice?

 

[alwaysLearning]

Thanks for the advice everyone. I think I'll put the 4k out of my mind for the rest of the year and just concentrate on putting away as much money as I can and learn as much as possible from reading and asking questions on here and playing the ASX game and the re-evaluate at the beginning of next year.

Forget about the ASX game. You want to learn how to trade, then forex is one of the best ways to do it. The skills you get from here are transferable to the stock market.

The problem with the ASX game and other stock market related stuff is that you can't practice and see the market at an intra-day level in real time unless you have an account with a broker with a certain amount of money in there.

If you do what I'm suggesting then you can see how irrational the markets are and actually practice trading at an intra day level. You'll learn way faster. After you gain basic skills here, then you'll have a better idea if trading is what you really want to do.

https://fx2.oanda.com/mod_perl/register/register.pl

http://www.forexfactory.com/calendar.php

http://www.babypips.com/school/

Some quick advice: Do not open a live account and trade until you are profitable doing demo trading. Once you have doubled your demo account whilst risking a max of 1% per trade, then you can open a small tiny live account.

Double your small live account while risking at a max of 1% per trade and then you are in a position to expand your live account a little.

So, I'm suggesting that you learn currency trading first because you have free access to demo accounts which are very accurate and provide you with free charting tools and indicators etc. You can learn how technical analysis works and be in a position to practice money management by using stop losses etc.

Note that technical analysis on its own is no holy grail. Money Management is the most important thing to learn about when it comes to trading in addition to developing an 'edge'.

Finally, don't blow your money trading. Seriously, if you stuff up, you can lose all your money in 'seconds'. I kid you not, 'seconds' if you don't know what you're doing.

Take your time and learn to trade properly. Trading I think is more about getting rich slowly rather than getting rich quick. Don't give up though because when you know what you are doing, $4k can turn into a hell of a lot over a few short years.

 

[skyQuake]

Disagree slightly, FX is a whole new game compared to stocks. Its on a completely different level. However it is MUCH faster than stocks, and you can learn a lot about trading in a relatively shorter timeframe.

Why not play the ASX game and trade forex demo?

 

[alwaysLearning]

Disagree slightly, FX is a whole new game compared to stocks. Its on a completely different level. However it is MUCH faster than stocks, and you can learn a lot about trading in a relatively shorter timeframe.

Why not play the ASX game and trade forex demo?

FX is a different beast to the stock market but the basic way to learn how to trade would be virtually identical. (except perhaps with the analysis of volume--unless you are trading currency futures, and the lack of DOM(depth of market)).

Agree though that you'll learn a lot, very very quickly if you trade currency.

The best thing is having excellent charting tools and real time quotes all for free in the demo account. I really believe that one has to see charts in realtime to know how trading works because when you look at end of day candle sticks and look only at static candle charts, you don't really see how price responds at particular levels in real time.

It's amazing to watch price struggle at a major support or resistance level, and you can count how many times price tries to break a particular level, and fails. If it keeps failing then that tells you something. It's not that it gives you a guaranteed knowledge of the direction of price but it does give you a hint of what is more likely to happen in the immediate short term. Or if you watch in realtime as price blows through a daily central pivot point, it too tells you something. But with EOD data you don't get much of an appreciation of these things I think.

It is fine to use purely EOD data to trade I just think that a new person to trading should see how market moves even on a 1minute time frame or 5min time frame, and tick chart to see how irrational the market can be.

And yeah, he can do both stocks and trade forex demo at the same time if he has the time and wants to do that.

The other thing is that having some idea of how currency works can only be beneficial when he starts trading equities anyway. His analysis might look at a sector such as commodities/mining and correlations with the Dollar index, and that might be a signal to look out for something in a group of stocks.

 

[Mr J]

but the basic way to learn how to trade would be virtually identical

I agree with this. Obviously different markets, but at the end of the day they're both still markets, and share a lot of characteristics.

Take your time and learn to trade properly. Trading I think is more about getting rich slowly rather than getting rich quick. Don't give up though because when you know what you are doing, $4k can turn into a hell of a lot over a few short years.

Agree with this as well. Crawl before you walk, walk before you run. Be patient, responsible, and hang in there. Very few incomes out there can achieve the growth and scalability of trading.

 

[wonderrman]

Come back in a bull market and you might be able to do it. A lot harder when everything is going down or remaining in a 'neutral' stage like it is now.

Depends on your personality I think, if you can remain completely unemotional and let your stops do the work I think it would be possible for someone to do reasonably well with only limited knowledge; in a bull market that is.

Starting with $4K is hard though as commission with Commsec will hurt you if you are only putting 500 - 1k in each position. You don't want to have to much risk by having $1 to $2K in one stock either.

w.

 

[Julia]

I've been trying to look at the education classes on the ASX site but none of them are working which is frustrating me a little bit.

I've just had a look and they are working well. Here is just one section that I accessed to check:
http://www.asx.com.au/products/pdf/getting_started_in_shares.pdf

Let us know if you're still having trouble.