You heard the news that many novice investors believe you can make a decent living trading stocks from home. The truth is you can, but you should follow some methodology and treat stock trading as if it were a business. That means planning, operating and a realistic assessment of where you are once you start. Technological advancements have simplified the process of stock trading. Yet there is a learning curve due to the terminology and platform lingo that you must learn in order to understand the basic premise of trading financial instruments. This guide will teach you the starting points about what your options are and what financial securities you can trade for profit.

Type of Trading Opportunities

Decide on what you want to trade. Depending on the features of your brokerage account there are several types of securities that you can trade. F1pro market  The most common being stocks which are shares of ownership in companies that are publicly traded. Publicly traded means the company has gone through rigorous reporting requirements in order to sell their securities on one of the public stock exchanges to raise money to operate their business. You will need to decide which types of trading you plan to do before opening a brokerage account.

Stock trading is buying, selling shares of companies which are publicly traded on the national exchanges such as NASDAQ, NYSE or AMEX.

Forex is the trading of government currencies with the thought of planning to sell once currencies increase or decrease in value.

Options trading is a security that allows you to trade the expected increase or decrease in the underlying stock security.

Open a simple brokerage account

In order to trade you will need a brokerage account. Tradesprime  A brokerage account is the key tool used to hold your funds and make trades on the national and regional exchanges. A brokerage account is critical because the company will provide a ton of resources to learn to trade. And provide guidance for the first-time stock trader. Different brokerages offer varying initial deposit amounts. And there is a simple online application process to set up an account and start trading.

Trading for the first time

It can be scary putting up say $1000 for a stock and then watch it go down to $750 in a day. Luckily you have done your research and the stock gradually improves over time and continues to go up for years. But you are never alone in making your first trade and most brokerage accounts allow you to do paper (mock) trades. This will give you an opportunity to learn the brokerage firms trading platform and how the system works. Focus on using experienced long time brokerage firms and clear away from unknown firms as they may appear to be cheap to open but have significant fees once you start trading.

Maintain a trading journal

Experienced traders use a form of record keeping that allows them to understand what they did for a particular trade. This can be accomplished with a trading journal. The journal allows you to keep track of why you invested in a certain security and why you eventually sold it. All the details of your rationale should be recorded in the trading journal. If you purchased a stock years ago the journal will remind you of your strategy and what you did.

Have a trading strategy and plan

The key technique of successful traders is to have a method or process of selecting and investing in securities. The plan is akin to having a business plan which is the overarching goals that help you decide trading strategy. An example is being a stock trader strategy where your focus is trading on short-term price movements versus an investor strategy who cares about longer-term price movement in a stock. The idea is to pick a strategy or combination of strategies, outline and stick to the plan to reduce as much impulse trades as possible. Additionally, sticking to a stock strategy will reduce changing strategy every time you make a trade. The plan and strategy are your trading roadmap.

Leverage available technology

With the current advances is financial trading technology the trader has at their disposal a myriad of tools to assist in identifying and executing potentially profitable trades. Leverage these resources and by doing so you learn a lot about specific trading techniques. These tools include stock screens which are automated filters that can quickly decipher financial trading data in seconds and deliver stocks that meet certain specific criteria.

Starting to trade securities doesn’t have to be scary and if done well can be a major money-making opportunity. You must follow a plan and strategy and leverage tools like etoro.com which provides a platform to automatically copy the trades of successful traders to improve your chances of making potential gains.