Here's my journey complete with the places I learnt from.
I first became interested in investing after watching a Robert Kiyosaki video on Youtube. I wanted to do real estate, so I followed Graham Stephan and Meet Kevin on Youtube. Then I realized I didn't have enough money and I didn't want to be tied down, so I turned to the other way to build wealth: the stock market. I started off on the traditional investing route, buying what I used. 85% SPY, 5% INTC, 5% AAPL, 5% NVDA.
After a while my friend introduced me to forex. Extremely lucky I didn't blow up since I had no idea about position sizing. Stopped after a few weeks.
I still had the trading bug in me. I found LiveTraders which introduced the position sizing concept to me. This is extremely important for stock traders, which is shocking to me why it's not plastered everywhere:
#shares = $risk / (entry$-stop$)
I was unprofitable for 3 months, but since I was using $10 risk per trade I only lost $500. They really drilled that idea into your head.
After six months, I began having revelations. I started to understand what these traders were really doing. I realizing what I was doing wrong when I reviewed my trades on Tradervue. After eight months, I started gaining confidence and increased my risk per trade.
A very important concept someone introduced to me was the metaphor of time frames. Trading 1-minute 9EMA pullbacks or the first three opening bars of the day is like strapping yourself to a rocket. Sure you'll go fast, but you'll probably die. It's much better to start off trading higher time frames as a beginner. You're driving your mom's old family van. And that's not even factoring in the fact that an extremely high number of day traders lose money. I found much better success swing trading.
This was bolstered with my discovery of Investors Business Daily's SwingTrader product. I was actually amazed there was such a reputable company doing swing trades. Their trades gave me an idea of what patterns to look for when the market cycle changed. This proved extremely useful following the 2020 crash, more on that later.
TradingSchools.org was also a great find for me. They review trading services. Their positive review on FollowMeTrades was interesting, so I signed up. This service introduced indicators to me like ichimoku clouds and Fibonacci retracements. I don't agree with indicators, but since they had a profitable track record I decided to follow their trades to see if I could find common ground between his Ichimoku/Fib/VantagePoint-AI trades with my TA trades.
Things went smoothly for half a year. I forced myself to not day trade since I was not a profitable day trader. This was based on objective truths like actual gain/loss, Sharpe ratio, profit factor, win rate, Kelly percentage, exit efficiency, etc. My swing trading had much better metrics so put my eggs here. I eventually realized if something looked particular good on daily/15m/5m time frames, I could start off with a day trade then sell some shares to leg into swing trade. In fact, I realized this is how a good day trader trades...by looking at the higher time frames. The 1-minute chart day traders still elude me though.
Options trading piqued my interest after r/wallstreetbets appeared in my Reddit home feed amidst the TSLA rally. I threw a few thousand dollars at random options. I lost all $5,000 when my MSFT 4/17 200 call options became worthless following the corona crash, among other things. This experience made me stay away from options for a little bit. I already had a system that worked so there was no point doing this.
After the market hit resistance in May 2020 and things slowed down, I dipped my toes into options again. I spent a lot of nights watching introductory videos from TastyTrade and OptionsAlpha. However, more importantly, I found a group called MasterTrader who literally invented TA back in the 80s. They sold options based on technical analysis, a strategy which IMO combines the best of both worlds. I was able to reinforce both my TA skills and my option knowledge.
After a while I found SteadyOptions, which traded more complex strategies like hedged strangles, hedged straddles, option ratios, diagonals, etc. It was one thing to learn about these strategies, it is another thing to actually gain the confidence to execute it. These guys gave it to me.
A big turning point for me was finding the BestStockStrategy review on TradingSchools.org (link). After following along this alert service, I realized how incorrect my idea of naked options was. I realized how much easier and stress free it is to sell option premium as opposed to constantly managing and finding new swing trades. This is what I'm focused on now.
Additionally, they linked the REAL P&L Youtube channel as validation. This is probably THE MOST honest trading channel on Youtube. His video on Ron Bertino's TradingDominion was especially insightful. That service introduced me to modern portfolio theory and gave actionable steps, which I didn't expect for something as esoteric as portfolio theory.
So here I am today. I traded forex for two weeks at the beginning and never went back. Then I day traded for a bit and found I wasn't profitable. Too fast paced for me and too many fake gurus, making it hard to learn. Currently I swing trade and sell options.