Welcome to your trading journey! This page is designed to help beginners understand the basics of trading.

1. Learn the basics

  • Understand what stocks and ETFs are
  • Learn order types (market vs limit vs stop)
  • Get familiar with margin and buying power
  • Go to the resources and look at the books/courses for python and trading

2. Open a practice account

  • Many brokers offer paper‑trading or simulator modes. Look at the resources/brokers page
  • Try placing dummy orders to build confidence. This is very important

3. Pick a simple strategy

  • Start with basic trend‑following or mean‑reversion
  • Most of the big funds use very basic strategies - don’t try to overcomplicate your strategies
  • Backtest historical data before risking real capital
  • Do not overfit the data. Overfitting and cherry-picking timeframes is a common mistake

4. Manage your risk

  • Never risk more than 1–2% of your account on a single trade
  • Use stop‑loss orders and position sizing rules
  • Remember you do not want to lose your account and have not capital left to trade in the future

5. Automate and iterate

  • Learn a bit of Python and use a broker API (e.g. Alpaca, Interactive Brokers, Oanda)
  • Build scripts to fetch price data, calculate signals, and submit orders
  • Log every trade and review your P&L to refine your approach

6. Be patient and persistent

  • Never give up. If you’re not making progress, don’t give up
  • Many times I run into issues and with a bit of patience, I’m able to solve them

7. Never stop learning

  • Take your time, build your playbook, and never stop learning
  • Happy trading!