New Rookie

TampaJake said: This is so sad. You have a few nuggets of good advice in this forum post and a whole bunch of bad advice. Rule #1: don't invest/trade money you can't afford to lose. Rule#2: Educate yourself. If you do not have options experience stay away. Rule#3: Practice. Plan your trades and trade your plan. Best to do it with practice money for awhile. Rule#4: Do not trade penny stocks (especially on Tradeking due to fees). Any company worth its salt will not be trading under $2 per share with the DJIA near 13,000. You might get away with a fixer upper in the real estate market, but not here most of the time.

 I agree, it's a swamp of over-complication, misinformation & newbies directing newbies.

For the sake of simplicity, I'll just say the new guy should look at your list, EasymoneyBob also made a very short suggestion on keeping it simple.

The BEST advice on this thread, bar none, is Oracole's.

It's not simple, but he pretty much covers the basics, Specifically # 2 on options.

Don't mean to hijack the thread but its the newest "noob" thread out there and we're both looking for the same thing, so I figured I'd jump in.

I just recently opened my account w/ $11,500, but I've already lost $500 of it by just jumping in. All of it was on bad Apple trades. I kept trying to time the bottom but it never worked out. Maybe a bad stock to start with, but its kind of put it in perspective that I don't know what I'm doing, so I've decided to paper trade for a while until I can get something consistent going.

So with that said, what are some good resources to use? I've already read a few trading books but none of them were really that helpful. I'm trying to get into technical analysis, but I don't know of any good programs/websites that will chart the info. The best I've been using is Google Finance, but that's pretty bare on what's shown.

Also let me throw this out there: How do you know when it's time to enter a trade? That's what I'm at the biggest loss for. I sit here and watch the prices go by, but I can't really make heads or tails of what the next movement will be. I'm mostly trying to do "day trading" style by trying to find a bottom, but maybe I should expand my horizons a bit to 1-3 day swing trading? In general I can see the "range" of what a certain stock oscillates between, but I always seem to wait too long before getting in and then when I do, I am constantly watching the price in fear. I want to be a little more certain when I trade.

I know that being more certain means I need to read and learn more, but I don't know *what* to read. I don't even know where to start. It's frustrating to have the drive to want to understand this, but not knowing how or where to start the understanding. Surely everyone here has been in my shoes at one point...can anyone give advice on how you finally got everything to "click"?

Rule # 1 find a company you do not like and buy it.
Rule # 2 find a company you like and short it.
That has been my experience.
Two stocks I liked KOMG went from $32 to$ 22, ABR from $24 to $4 in 2007. While I watched a company declare bankruptcy and its price tripled.

 TampaJake said: This is so sad. You have a few nuggets of good advice in this forum post and a whole bunch of bad advice. Rule #1: don't invest/trade money you can't afford to lose. Rule#2: Educate yourself. If you do not have options experience stay away. Rule#3: Practice. Plan your trades and trade your plan. Best to do it with practice money for awhile. Rule#4: Do not trade penny stocks (especially on Tradeking due to fees). Any company worth its salt will not be trading under $2 per share with the DJIA near 13,000. You might get away with a fixer upper in the real estate market, but not here most of the time.

That is good advice and here is some good advice from a book.

"The distinction I want to make is that the majority of traders don't specifically relate to a fair price or value; they relate to comfort. What gives them comfort is doing what everyone else is doing. In a balance area, traders are basically absorbing each other's orders ... When I say that traders relate to comfort, I mean some degree less of the fear they normally feel. Most of the trades take place in a value or balance area because it is where most of the traders feels the least fear, somewhere in the middle of the trading range between an established high and low. This is precisely why there are fewer trades outside the value or balance area and why, as Steidlmayer and Koy say, these trades represent the best opportunities to make money, "to buy or sell away from value." And that is why these are the scariest trades to make because the trader who can make them is all alone; there is no safety in numbers."

"The Disciplined Trader", Mark Douglas

Value area's use volume and price, can be done yearly, monthly (usually the first week), daily and hourly and so on.