The New Trading For A Living

The New Trading For A Living teaches you a calm approach to stock trading, by equipping you with the basic tools of chart analysis, risk-minimizing rules and showing you which amateur mistakes to avoid when getting started as a stock trader.

Like anything, becoming a good trader won’t happen overnight, but while you can’t skip getting all the experience necessary to make a decent living at it, what you can skip are a few rookie mistakes.

Commissions, for example. No matter which broker you sign up with, they’ll take a commission for every single trade you make. These aren’t cheap, so $10 per trade is a very common fee to pay. But if you’re just starting out, you probably don’t have too much money to invest, so if you trade a lot, the commissions will eat up your entire profits.

Imagine you’re investing $10,000 over the course of a year, doing 4 trades a week, which is not a lot. At $10 per trade, you pay $40 each week, just in commissions! If you keep this up 50 weeks of the year, you’ll pay $2000 in commissions – 20% of your entire trading capital!

That’s why it’s important to pick a broker with very low fees in the beginning and keep your trading to a minimum. I signed up with Degiro, a Dutch online broker, who has very low fees (less than $1 per trade on most trades) and only make 2-3 trades per month.

Another rookie mistake is trading emotionally. Just like in a good poker game, emotions have no place in trading. You can’t feel personally attached to any one stock and shouldn’t just buy a company’s stock because you like their product.

When you bring emotions into trading, you’ll start to gamble. When you feel incapable of resisting the urge to trade, or like “that one stock’s gonna take off” and let your trades influence your emotions, that’s when you know you’re trading like a gambler (great movie, btw).

But trading is just a way to make money, and just like you don’t emotionally obsess over your paycheck, rent, debit card or phone bill, you can’t do it with trading either.

Once you let your emotions control how you trade, you can literally watch your capital go down to zero in an instant. So leave your emotions at home and trade with a mind as cool as the coins you want it to put inside your pocket.

Elder has two wonderful rules to help you avoid gambling and minimize your risks and losses. They’re called the 2% rule and the 6% rule. The 2% rule says you can’t risk more than 2% of your entire trading capital…