The first thing you obviously need to do, is open a trading account. I personally use Schwab as my brokerage, and I recommend it to anyone starting out because of how good their trading platform ThinkOrSwim is. ThinkOrSwim is how you are able to view charts, scan for stocks, create watchlist of stocks, buy and sell stocks, etc. The heart and soul of your trading. You can use my referral link to sign up if you want: https://www.schwab.com/client-referral?refrid=REFERB78KUM6D.

Now trading the stock market is a SLOW game. You need to understand that it's definitely not a "get rich quick" kind of thing. The typical investor makes something like 7-10% return on their investment (ROI) PER YEAR. That means for every $10k, best case, you are going to make $1000 each year. Thankfully, my strategy will yield me about a minimum of 100% ROI (in good/sideways markets). But still, if you don't have a lot of money to start with, you aren't going to get rich for a while.

Now to trade a similar method to how I trade, make sure you setup a standard individual brokerage account. Sure if you would like enable margin, options, etc. I personally only use a small amount of margin sometimes, and never trade options. Margin, for those who don't know, is leverage aka basically borrowing money for a % based cost. Kind of like a short term loan. It's risky, but can managed and useful.

Once you have a trading account setup, I recommend depositing whatever amount of funds you are willing to lose into it. I don't think paper trading is a good way to start, unfortunately it's going to take loss to actually grow in this game and I think having to deal with those emotions when trading is an important factor in that growth. Which is why i recommend live trading to start, just don't deposit your entire net worth into the account until you start understand some of the key concepts to trading.

Now that you have an account setup, download ThinkOrSwim to your desktop and on your phone if it supports it. Here is the desktop link: thinkorswim Download | Charles Schwab. This is basically your charting platform, active buying and selling platform, scanning, etc. Everything you do in trading, besides admiring your gains, will be in ThinkOrSwim.

Once you do have it downloaded, I recommend at the very least, downloading my Free ThinkOrSwim Workspace. This will setup all of your charts, and the overall look and feel of the platform in a way that I feel benefits the user. You can always play with it and adjust it, but that's currently what I use and like. You don't have to purchase any of the custom indicators yet, but if its something you want to explore, here is the link to my custom tools page.

Now it's time to learn some of the basics to trading. There's a few things you HAVE to know how to do in trading. We'll start with how to read candle charts, which is a very simple concept. Below is an image detailing how to read them, and here is a super simple youtube video explaining it:

The next basic concept I will talk about is going to be Volume. Volume is a "study" in ThinkOrSwim that you can add to charts. If you downloaded my free workspace, it should automatically be added to all of your charts, but if not you will need to add it yourself. How to read volume is the next part.

Above is an image of a standard chart candlestick chart. Disregard the blue, pink, and orange line on the chart. Those are moving averages, which we will get into in probably a different blog. Look at the bars on the bottom part of the screen, that is your volume study/indicator. Now each candle on your chart, will have an associated volume bar to it. If you hover on a candle, and then look down at the volume study. You will see a number displayed, on the image in this blog it is the green "432,538" number. That number means exactly this: 432,538 shares of that stock were traded for that given candle. If you are on the daily candle stick chart, then it means that for that day X amount of shares were traded. See, super simple. Now the yellow number you see is the average volume for one candle on whatever timeframe chart you are displaying. You can edit how many candles they use for calculating the average by changing what is called the "length" for your specific volume average study. This is easily researchable, just google how to edit studies in thinkorswim.

A core concept of my trading strategy is something called daily dollar volume. Now stay with me, were gonna get a little more complicated here. I will go on the daily candle stick chart, which means that for every day there will be 1 candle displayed on the chart, and it will usually be a 1 year chart. So i can see 365 candles, each displaying their own day of price action. I will look at the volume study on that specific chart, and look at the yellow number that displays the average daily volume for that stock. Then, for whatever the price of the stock is, I will take that yellow number (the average shares traded) and multiply it by the stock price. That is now the daily average DOLLAR volume, aka how much $$ is being traded on average each day. It's something I use to make sure a stock is liquid enough to trade.

High volume = high conviction, low volume = weak conviction. We obviously want high conviction in trading, so for whatever strategy you employ. Look at the volume.

The next basic concept in trading is going to be risk management. Trading is a numbers game, basically +EV gambling. As long as you are able to keep your losers small and winners big, you will be a winner. That's why risk management is so important. Now the standard when it comes to risk management, is to not risk more than 0.5-1% of your total account value per trade. With smaller accounts (under 100k-200k), you can maybe risk more like 1.5-2%. How to calculate your risk is simple, if you are buying a stock at $10 and you are going to place your stop loss @ $9. Then you are risking $1 per share, meaning for an account worth 100k risking only 1% ($1000). You are allowed to buy a maximum of 1000 shares. I EMPLOR you to use stop losses, it changed the game for me and allows me to trade stress free. But you basically just take your risk in dollar form, in our example $1000, and divide it by how many $ per share you are risking. In our example, 1000/1 = 1000 shares we can buy.

So, to summarize this all up. There are three core concepts you should learn prior to placing your first trade. One, how to read a candle stick. Two, the volume indicator/study. And three, risk management. Of course, these three concepts will probably not make you become a profitable trader. But it is a good start, and I recommend after learning these you read some of my other blogs and purchase my trading strategy PDF if its something that you are interested in learning.