Hi All

As the title says beginner here, just found the forums a few days ago. I have developed an interest in trading over the past couple of weeks and have spent that time reading this and a couple of other fourms and have begun reading some recommended books.

I am beginning to develop an idea in my head as to what to do. Research and develop a trading plan for a few months. Use a practice account and test and adjust the plan accordingly. When you have something on paper that works move to real money, only risking 1-2% of the money available. Stick to the plan and do not deviate, and dont let emotions get in the way.

I know it is no where near this simple. its just a rough idea that i have in my head from what i have read thus far.

I have full time job and saw trading as something i could do in my spare time rather than wasste it playing computer games and a way to boost my income long term. i dont expect to make a profit in my first 3-4 years, i just want to learn and begin to understand my chosen market and hopefully break even with correct risk management and being fully prepared before launching myself into using real money.

So my problem and the reason i would like other peoples opinions is this:

I have very little starting capital ($1000) and no prior knowledge in finance. The reason i developed an interest is that im a IT guy by trade and while browsing the internet saw a course on programming trading bots (i now know not to trust such claims and developing myself is the way to go).
Yesterday i spent most my time looking back at previous posts with either $500, $1000 or beginner in the title and i must say most if not all were very negative ( im not saying that's bad, it could be my saving grace) most state that you are better just spending the money as $1000 will get you no where. The few positive posts pointed me in the direction of spread betting as a swing trader to reduce commissions and do not expect to make any profit.

So my question to the current users that are browsing this forum is what would you suggest to someone like myself. Whichever way the consensus leans will guide me either towards or away from trading as a future.

I apologise for the long post and thank you in advance for any advice or opinions. They are all very much appreciated, positive and negative!

Hi All

..

I have very little starting capital ($1000) and no prior knowledge in finance. ...

So my question to the current users that are browsing this forum is what would you suggest to someone like myself. ...

If you let other people discourage you from trading then you may not have enough passion or interest to continue.

I would not start with Ninjatrader 7 again NT is ok for manual trades but almost perversely rubbish for moderately sophisticated bot development.

sure, take $150 from that $1000 and subscribe to elite membership then read this to start

Rory:
Your post gives me a lot of hope. I what you say confirms what i have also been reading that manual trading seems to be the way to go when trying to learn the trade.

I understand if you would rather keep it to yourself, but what platform did you end up working with. I have seen many positive reviews of NinjaTrader but all from a manual perspective.

Hi Boggot, I'm using Ninjatrader still for my sins. It is perfectly good for learning or ordinary manual trading but its an aged architecture now, the multithreading etc. is poor so it can be unstable or at least irritating when you need to push the boat out a bit. Its the most extensible of course but much of this is driven by perceived deficiencies people sought to remediate (a familiar story in I.T. of course).

Everything in buggy code can be fixed naturally but time is valuable and there is a lot of (unnecessary?) ugly stuff say in unmanaged bot code / multi-timeframe architecture and backtesting...an evil tar pit everyone goes through with bots. I'm not trying to over mention bots, just I figure that you being in I.T. would lean (like I did) to poke around there fairly soon and as you mentioned coding them. I have simply had the nagging feeling that I would have been better off with maybe Metatrader .NET considering what I wanted to initially achieve but thats me. Maybe it just seems to me that the MT guys complain less about fundamental stuff?

NT is just fine/more affordable to begin trading with manually though and that is where you need to start as you already gathered. Your issue is I understand: will interest be sustainable, can you afford it and even doing everything properly will you find in a year you learned a lot but...

Cory's suggestion regarding the order flow learning approach is appealing to me (if I was to advise myself starting off). With typical beginner chart trading / price action systems etc. you get caught up in a thousand options/indicator meltdown and easily miss the fundamental understanding of how money flows when robotically following trade setups & best practice 'rules'.

DOM/Order book trading is (I think?) a significantly smaller universe to assimilate though maybe visually unappealing, there are foundation lessons learned there you will have to know soon enough to achieve profitability.

If you do look at NT, feel free to PM me sometime. I had stability glitches to resolve with CQG data to Chicago (some start with this on monthly trial over NT's integrated out-of-hours only Kinetick) from my Wiltshire based ISP and as your in nearby Truro it could save some effort.