Replies to post #83873 on Zeev's Turnips Patch-No Politics (ZEEV)

[Zeev Hed]

i I would say you really need $150 K and assume that $50 K will be your "tuition fees", you can easily play with $5 K to $10K per trade, but it would be best to have a "wrap account", and I think the minimum for that is $150 K.

Zeev

[Alchemist]

Here is another approach to starting out day or swing trading.

Open an Account with Interactive Brokers. Start trading 50 share blocks. The commission at IB is a penny a share with a dollar minimum. If you are consistently losing money with 50 shares, slowly lower the block size. If you are making money, slowly raise it. Make yourself earn the right to trade larger size.

You won't be losing much money at all because your share size will be going down as you lose money.

This is the way I did it and it worked. I never lost much money to pay my tuition (There was still a big tuition fee - it was time :) ).

There are big advantages over paper trading because you are actually making trades in the market. You have to deal with order entry, emotions, bad fills, etc.

I would think $50,000 would be enough in the account to start this way.