How Did You Get Into Trading?

[JillyB]

My first interests in trading were sparked at the beginning of October last year by......wait for it....a Goldline systems email. I didn't respond to the advert but it was enough to make me curious.

On the 6th October 2004, I purchased two books by Toni Turner on trading and that was it. By November I had opened a spread-betting account and by the turn of the year I had lost 75% of my initial investment. (They do say that you have to first lose your capital before you can become a successful trader - that's my excuse anyway.)

Now I have learnt many lessons - most of them the hard way - but I am starting to get some of that capital back. The most important thing I have learnt is... to have a trading plan - a set of indicators that tell you when a trade should be entered. At all other times you can then ignore your feelings and emotions and only place the trade when the indicators tell you.

Now that I have stopped dithering and have built trust in my plan, things are starting to turn around.

 

[millsy500]

I began a few months ago when a friend told me he had bought the goldline system and how well he was doing. Me being me i checked it all out and now i'm hooked. I'm still equal and extremely pleased with my progress,though i have put in a ton of hours. This website has been a fantastic help thanks go out to all!
Bumped into my friend a few months later who is now 20 grand lighter!

Millsy

 

[Tomerep]

A friend brag me about his winning here and there, and advise me to start trading myself, at the time I knew nothing about the markets, and started trading on a tip he gave me, which ended up in a nice profit, but then I wanted to know myself how to trade, what to do, the hunger for knowledge.. so I read a lot of books, and started trading all by myself, I think i'm a head of him now because he still risk too much and when he lose, he lose a lot.. well thats my story.
Tomer.

 

[Simon Gordon]

Hitting 18 years of age I made a beeline to the bookmakers and gambled on the horses. I moved to London and started reading the Evening Standard which had the City pages next to the racing fixtures. At that time Polly Peck was going from a penny share to £35 and this really grabbed my attention.

So I started gambling on penny shares by just selecting the stock on it's name - information was extremely scarce. Obviously I lost money but the love affair had started.

Over the years my confidence improved as did the flow of information available. I came across Harriman House and found a treasure trove of books on investing. John Train became my first virtual teacher - at this time he had a column in the FT on a Saturday and I liked his cool wisdom. His books taught the importance of clarity in decision making.

I then became a big Soros fan.

Next I devoured the histroy of Wall Street from my local library where I could order very old out of print books.

After this I came to the realisation that my own dynamic psyche was going to be my key area of focus if I was to become a profitable trader. Psychotherapy was worth every penny and since stopping this I have searched high and low for great books on the psychology of investing - at the moment my best virtual teacher is Dr. Richard Geist.

SKY TV in 2001 was a revelation and Bloomberg TV is fantastic.

I started on BB's a year ago and since investing in a laptop with Wi Fi I have become a dual surfer of the Net and Bloomberg/CNBC.

 

[thekid]

doing an assignment in university in a course called 'Options, Future and Risk Management'

IN the project we had to buy and sell futures in anything we chose..i liked the idea that everyday you could track money made or lost

from there is started reading anything i could but soon found out the better books from the others and found there was an aspect of trading that could be controlled to a certain degree with the right discipline, strategy and psychology

alos no job in finance interested me

 

[CityTrader]

After 18 years trading in The City - got made redundant, so went for the obvious- trading for myself. I still find it bizarre that people from other careers just seem to up and change direction to trade. And then after 1 or 2 years whine that they've lost money! I wouldn't expect to be able to make a living as a lawyer, Architect, accountant after 2 years. Nor would I expect to be able to qualify whist studying part time -Guess some people only see the glory of trading, not the years of experience and graft required.

 

[Anonymous]

I used to go the money changers to change currency, pounds, US dollars, etc. I love comic books, bought lots of them, Spiderman, Superman, Batman etc. And I've watched the pound and US dollar go up and down since I was a kid. And I looked at the how the bookies calculate their odds, very interesting stuff. And I had a little money in the banks. And I studied a little, maybe a lot, I read a lot. And then the Floating Rate. Well, if anyone can figure out what it all means.

 

[MBAKiran]

so many ways to get dragged in

Hello,

This is a really interesting thread to read -I'm amazed at the many different ways that people have got into trading. I don't do any trading yet but am just starting to look into it - I'm currently doing my MBA and one part involved learning about trading and somehow I actually found it rather interesting - but I am a bit scared of loosing money!

Mind your for my final year project I have decided to look into the marketing of online trading platforms for people who trade from home and I just didn't realise there were do many platforms to choose from. - in case I'll be looking for one that is super simple I think.

If any of you have a few mins it would be really helpful if you give me a hand with my project and fill in my survey using the link below - thank you in advance to those of you who can help out.
Kiran

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=961231405672