Athena Trader

1. Paper trade successfully for a period of time (at least a few months) before diving in. Start by keeping your trades small because your focus is to get it right rather than make it big. By starting small, your stress levels are reduced and you can make better decisions. Be prepared to stop live trading for a while if your small live trades go bad and after closing your open positions, you need time to research and look through your trade diary/notes or make new notes to find out where you went wrong. The key is to observe, be patient, dedicate yourself and persevere for a period of time so no shortcuts to trading success unless you are one of the few trading geniuses out there. 
 2. Seed money would depend on type of trading instruments you trade, equities can be costly so your seed money has to be substantial. Depending on types of market and if daylight savings is a factor to be considered, your seed money has to be adjusted accordingly. Decide on your filters such as industrie...

A long time ago, I wrote about Million Dollar Traders  which I chanced upon on YouTube. It was rather interesting and a reader wrote in to ask for a review. I thought of going one step further and share what a FT retail trader does as well. I figured that a comparison is more fun than writing about a day in the life of a FT retail trader.  In Million Dollar Traders, a bunch of normal people learnt the ropes from an ex City trader and they start their day by reading the news to gather ideas for the trades they are going to place. Both ACCICB and I are self taught so there's no mentor so to speak to guide us. I'm not sure whether they learnt FA and TA or just TA but I apply both and ACCICB applies mainly TA.  What I do every morning is a little different from them as I go directly into Google Finance whereas ACCICB uses Marketwatch to look at the price charts, read a little news on how the U.S. markets ended last night to see its effect on JPY market when it o...

Source: Wikipedia Over the week I ran out of K-dramas to watch while I dry my hair. I chanced upon this show called Million Dollar Traders which you can find on YouTube.com . It is a 3 part series reality show whereby a current hedge fund manager Lex van Dam gave 1 million sterling equivalent of his own money to 8 trading newbies to trade for 2 months.  Ex city trader Anton Kreil was appointed as the manager of the group and his resume and how he came to learn about trading is rather interesting. The show was filmed during the global financial crisis period of 2008 - 2009 and yes they were trained before being let loose on the trading floor.  I find it rather fascinating given that I'm no trader material since you have to be good at math and be able to handle stress well. Plus I think they left out the fact that you must be able to handle very little sleep as you work like say from 6am to 9pm.  Plus there are many other attributes that a trader should po...