1. Caveat: the market can teach expensive unforgiving lessons. After you've read, learned and developed your own theories/strategies test them with practice and

1. Caveat: the market can teach expensive unforgiving lessons. After you've read, learned and developed your own theories/strategies test them with practice and see if you're any good - consistently. Use a free service like vse.marketwatch.com or wallstreetsurvivor.com, or just pen and pad for several weeks/months before actually trading. This becomes more important depending on your level of aggression/risk. 2. Always define how much you're comfortable losing before trading. (time frames for entering/exiting trades helps too) The more you adhere to this the better you can control emotion-based trade decisions, and that equals money in this game.