[Shoe]

[ QUOTE ]
You don't want to invest a lot of cash starting out? Well, you're going to have to.

$25k is the minimum size account for daytrading. Add another $5k for minor losses right off the bat. You can probably take an actual course for $3500 or join a pay chatroom and hope to pick it up by osmosis. Oh, and there's that thing about losses while you're trying to learn - figure another $25k IF you are able to pick it up quickly and have natural talent.

Not to mention the quitting the job thing so you can actually watch the market. It's not like you can surf the web for 30 seconds every half hour and daytrade.

As for being sick of getting up every day at the same time, the market opens every day at the same time, 9:30 a.m. If you live on the west coast, that's 6:30, and you really should be up and scanning the morning market news two hours before that.

[/ QUOTE ]

I don't see any reason why anyone couldn't learn how to day-trade for free (with the exception being if you are buying/selling so much at once you are actually moving the market).

If you don't have a job, or are able to to take enough time off to in essence, "learn at the play money tables", I don't see why you can't sit at home with a pen and paper, open an account at scottrade, and use their streaming quotes to watch the market. Instead of trading with real money, write down when/what you would buy at what price, and when/what you would sell for what price. It might not be exact to the penny, but you should have a pretty good idea if your trades would be making money or not.

There is no reason to just say you are going to lose $25k no matter what. That just sounds outrageous to me and there is no way you could not educate yourself enough for free to greatly minimize the loss you would take.

The perfect analogy of course is learning to play poker. You don't have to start out at $30/$60 and lose $25k to learn how to play the game. It can be done for virtually free. Start out at the free tables, once you beat them try the penny tables.... keep working your way up until your a pro (or reach your limit).

Yes, you need $25k to open a daytrading account, but that in no way means you need to invest all $25k at once or even in a single stock. After you are confident from your "free trades" that you made on paper, start out with some smallish trades around $500 to $1,000 each to get comfortable with the market, and work your way up from there.

I also, would be willing to pay for an education or classes to speed up the process, but i would NEVER make a trade(s) with the expectation of losing money. That's not to say there won't be growing pains along the way, just I don't see why those growing pains can't be kept to a minimum with a proper approach.

The key of course would be keeping yourself honest. Write down every trade you would make on paper and don't omit anything. Buy at the ask price and sell at the bid price. Don't make any assumptions or omit any bad trades. Don't start tradign with real money until you can win on paper. Learn from each trade you make. What went right, what went wrong, and why?