Start Trading – How to Be Profitable in 10 Years
We all want to make a lot of money, retire early, and then travel the world. To be honest, that was the dream we used to have growing up.
We was motivated by a number of documentaries on rich people that were always on Bloomberg TV., so we made the decision to try our best to be as rich as they were and retire by the time we hit 40 (or 50, not more).
In this article, we will explain a few steps you should take to achieve this dream and start trading.
Table of Contents
Start as Early as You Can
In the investment business, the best time to start investing is now. You should not keep on postponing the time you will start to trade.
Remember, the earlier that you start trading, the better it will be for you.
If you start learning how to trade when you are 20 years old, by the time you are 30, you will have 10-years’ experience as a trader which not many people have it.
Remember, you will go through the five stages that every trader goes through which are:
- Unconscious Incompetence – where you know its possible to make money but you don’t know how. So you open the trades without any analysis, make some money, and then lose it all.
- Conscious Incompetence – where you realize that you need more time to learn how to trade. You learn a lot of things from different sources.
- The eureka moment – where you realize that you don’t need all the information you are feeding yourself with. You realize that you can make money by just using a simple moving average.
- Conscious competence – where you start making money while paying a very close attention to the indicators. Here you make a few pips on a daily basis.
- Unconscious competence – You have now become a pro and simple losses does not mess up your day.
As a trader, you will have to go through these steps. Therefore, the earlier you start learning about trading, the better it is for you.
Start saving early
As a trader, you possibly make good income. The moment you start making money as a trader, we recommend that you set a certain percentage of your profits and save them in a retirement account.
This can be a fixed deposit account or an account by a money manager.
Creating the Strategy
As you navigate the steps above, you will find yourself at a position of creating your new trading strategy. This is where you combine a few strategies which will tell you what to do when something happens.
For instance, if you use a double moving average strategy, you will only trade when the two lines cross one another. In this stage, you should use what you have learnt to create a strategy that combines both technical and fundamental analysis.
As a young person that start trading, this strategy will help you master it before you get to 30. After you create the strategy, you should test and backtest it as well.
This will help you make accurate and informed decisions in your trading.
Raising Funds
Chances are high that as a young person in your early years you don’t have a lot of money. You will need to raise funds from family, friends, and other people to trade.
The good thing is that you don’t need millions of dollars to make a lot of money as a trader. With about $10,000 you can be at a good place of making good money for the long-term.
For instance, you can decide to make just $200 every day using your strategy. From your $10,000, you will be making $4,000 every month which is not a bad thing.
The best thing to do to raise funds during this time is from your parents, friends, and relatives. Ensure that you warn them that the funds could disappear within days. Once you break even, you can go ahead and trade with your own money.
This will be advantageous for you because you won’t have a lot of pressure in your investment. To achieve this goal, follow these principles:
- Aim for small profits.
- Trade only a few times a day.
- Always have a stop loss to mitigate your losses.
- Always hedge your trades.
- Write all your trading moves (Tips fo a Day Trading Journal).
- Take time every day to look at your wins and losses.
And now, a quick look to the future.
Create a Healthy Retirement Nest Egg
An important benefit about being a trader is that if you do it full time for many years, you will likely be very successful in future.
Even during retirement, you will be spending a few hours every day trading and making good money.
However, trading is risky and during your retirement, you don’t want to lose all your money. As such, starting to make small money moves can help prepare you become a better person in retirement.
Diversify Income: combine trading and investing
Always have a separate trading account and an investment account. In this, you should create a day trading account and another account which you will use to invest in the long term. In the latter account, you should buy bonds and stocks (in any way, we recommend you high-yielding stocks of good companies).
The idea here is to have a diversified portfolio that will gain in time and one that will continually add more money to your portfolio through capital gains and dividends.
Be disciplined about money
As a young person, you probably want to have the best house in your neighborhood. You want to travel the world and have the best cars. While this is good, chances are that it will lead you to financial ruin in the long-term.
For example, you likely love fast cars like Mercedes and Porsche. There is nothing wrong in buying these cars. However, you should do your best to buy things that you need.
The fact is that you should always spend less money than you make. You should also avoid buying things that you don’t need. For example, you don’t need a 10-bedroom house
Avoid complacency
You should avoid complacency at all costs. If you want to retire early, you need to work hard in your youth and avoid relaxing just because you have made it. Complacency has led many people to financial ruin without even realizing it.
The truth is that you should continue to work hard even after achieving success. When you hit 50 and have everything you will ever need, you can now travel the world and do all the things you avoided in your youth.
Start Trading – Useful Links
- Read how to start trading on Investopedia
- Disocver tips on how to start trading on TheGuardian
