Allo Jonno. I think it is essential that you have some sort of backup or reserve resources if you're going to have trading as your job - whether it means living in your folks' garage, off your wife (best option me thinks), inheritence or whatever. You need to be able to sit out the lean years (figuratively). I reckon, you must keep enough aside to be able to go bust at least twice. If it happens three times, perhaps you should reconsider trading. I basically went bust twice starting about 18 months ago. I had enough resources to keep me going during that period, without having to cover my monthly expenses in trading. I know what it's like to trade on your credit card, while I don't neccessarily recommend it... For me the best teacher was experience. You need to feel what it feels like to make 123% on WAVES in a morning and what it feels like to loose it three days time. You need to TRY different strategies. Keep records. Learn from your mistakes. Go to all the SB courses. Time, patience and intelligent work and you will make progress. It also dawned on me that what you can do (in derivatives) with a hundred thousand, you can do with ten or twenty thousand. The difference is a couple of successful trades. Use that as the test. The converse is also true - if you can't do it with 10 or 20 thousand, don't be tempted to try with 100k. Earn your trades. Let the market do the work. The most difficult thing to do is to do nothing! I guess if you don't have significant resources to start with, you need to start at 0. I wouldn't expect overnight success. Just persevere. Good luck. The freedom of not having a boss or to depend on an organisation is such a rich prize that you should give it your very, very best shot.
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