In part 1 informed I started to consider the financial implications of quitting the employment to instead start trading full-time for a living. There are more than simply monetary considerations even as will see later, until then, there are a few more costs to ponder.
More Costs!
Let’s start working on equipment. Presumably you already possess a PC and connection to the internet by virtue of the actual fact you are scanning this on the internet. But are these both as much as the job of trading fulltime? Again the specifications for both hardware and ISP is based largely with your trading style, but when you’re relying upon a 100Mhz Pentium II as well as a dial up service, you’re setting yourself up for failure. So afford quality equipment, budget to hold it as much as spec, and provide some repairs too – expect the unexpected.
Many traders increase the risk for mistake of saying “This will perform me whilst I begin, and I’ll get something better when I develop real money”. This is basically false economy, you’re unlikely to ever make real cash with a substandard setup (which applies equally to substandard software and data feeds). This is a cut-throat business and 95% fail, you should give yourself every advantage you may. You wouldn’t go into the Indy 500 within a go-kart with all the intention of choosing a better car when you’ve won several races, plus the same thing applies here.
Earnings
When you’ve added all this together, you’ve got a pretty good picture of how much money you must generate from a trading so that you can live. Does your past performance suggest it is possible to meet this target? It’s tempting to state “When I go steady I’ll make much more”, but exactly how do you know this is actually the case? Perhaps you may take a little while holiday and try it – unless you make enough as two weeks well then, your not ready. A few weeks really isn’t lots of time to know if you are going to succeed though. An ideal following step then is always to cut your regular job hours to not professional and trade maybe several days per week. This way you understand you have some funds coming in, you are free to trade the real deal, in case it all goes horribly wrong that you are probably better placed to acquire back into full-time employment than somebody that quit the significant world completely.
The option of part-time work is an extra many of us will not have however. So does it should be all or nothing – trade or work? Why not keep the afternoon job and trade outside your working hours likewise. If you might be trading and end of day strategy, this is easily achieved by doing all of your research at night and placing the correct combinations of Stop and Limit orders together with your broker. For day traders, certainly practising is very simple if your intended marketplace is not the house market, as an example if you want to trade the US so you live in the UK where you are able to come home and paper trade at night.
There is also another try prior to buying options open to the morning traders who wants to practise trading their residence market beyond normal hours though. eSignal enables you to download tick data for virtually any symbol and act back in actual time or speeded up so that you could trade all day every day in an hour. Other vendors have similar offerings, and if you could have an IB account you are able to use AutoTrader to record tick data during your day for playback in to a demo version of SierraCharts or QuoteTracker totally free.
The the main thing here is that before the plunge, you’ll want to have done all things in your capacity to prepare yourself for lies ahead. It will always be harder than you ever thought, however it will be nigh on impossible without the need of preparation whatsoever.