Hello everyone

Id like to start off by saying hi to everyone on here you all seem pretty chill and mature which got me to make an account for this purpose. well i am debating on giving day trading a try. This isn't something i just woke up and decided to try out and risk all my money or watched a wall-street movie and been like "i want millions" like some people that i noticed have done on some of these forums i Googled. Ok well i want to open an account starting at 1,000usd. i don't plan on making this my living (as you can tell from a 1k starting account) or a primary income, im not even trying to make this into a income of any sort at this time or in the near future. i just want first hand experience in day trading so i decided to risk 1k which im willing to lose all of it in an attempt to learn if everything goes well for the rest of 2011 i may even deposit a 10k or more account to start off seriously. i currently attend college payed for my the GI bill (4 years in the Marines) plus they give me living allowance plus i pull in unemployment which is great for my case because its more a month then i was getting when i was still in the military. So i received a few grant checks and 1k is minor to me considering i have about 20k in electronics in my room alone not trying to brag just stating i think now would be a good time to learn day trading rather then a few years down the road when i wish i did. Well i have no real questions at this moment i just wanted to see if this would be a good place to start and didnt see a forum link for new people other then this question thread.

Hope you all had a good weekend and hope you all do well this week trading. Hopefully one day soon i could sit here at the computer trading amongst you all!

Hi Zel - welcome to the site and forum!

Why risk anything at all? If you've been in the marines then you've learned discipline. You should be able to apply that discipline to paper trading and do it diligently without "cheating" yourself into believe that your results are better than they should be.

Make all of the beginner's mistakes on paper and once you have a profitable system you can risk real money.

Definitely paper trade as DT recommends, otherwise that 1k will be gone faster then you imagine.

Once you feel comfortable with the paper trading then move on to a small account because trading real money is very different from paper trading.

From there you can move to a larger account if you determine this is something you want to continue with.

Hello,

I blew up 2 accounts.

Bigtime.

My own fault. Everything I wasn't doing on SIM I was doing live. I hope you won't do the same. Sim sim sim. Papertrade Papertrade, please.

I wish I had papertraded longer. I'm talking about thousands of hours of screen time before you even touch a live account.

Normally you won't listen to me, that means that I'll take your money, in a blink of an eye.

thanks for the info everyone but ive been paper trading using thinkorswim by ameritrade for a week now and as of today i made 2,521.00 p/l for the day soo either paper trading seems wrong on this program or im doing something right? which my biggest p/l was the Australian dollar in about 30 mins which was 1200 says the program. so can anyone tell me if this program is any good? to me 2,500 in a day is a bit much?

the acc gave me 10,000 with buying power of 100,000