Young Trader, in the making

Good morning, or good evening, depending on when you read this.

A little about myself:
My name is Frank (my nickname of Podis), and I am currently 18. I have always been interested in the financial markets, ever since I was a small. Throughout public school, I have always had the dream of being a stock broker, and so I was on the track to go to an Ivy League university in order to be accepted into a large trading firm.

However, in my junior year of high school, a friend introduced me to a guy who traded forex, the owner of MentorTips,com. He boasted a 99% accuracy in his trades, a bit too good to be true. However, still being young (heh, not that much has changed), i fell into this scam. Even though I was ripped off, it gave me light into the wonderful world of forex. I fell in love with it, and I won’t let one bad experience ruin the love I have for this.

After losing a few hundred in the market off of false signals, I have a new perspective in how I am to operate. (I know many of you have lost a lot more before this clicked.) “Hey, maybe instead of treating the markets as a casino or a gut feeling, I should actually learn how to do this.” Hence, my adventure in finding online resources to become a retail trader.

As I search, I find more and more helpful communities that have formed, such as BabyPips! My goal isn’t to become the richest guy on the block in a matter of weeks using the markets, but my goal is now to learn as much as I can for as long as I can. Thankfully, being so young, I have the opportunity to dedicate the majority of my time learning, with very few obligations (Family, full-time job, etc).

Now, I am developing my trading style. However, I would love to talk to more experienced traders about your guys’ mistakes, what you learned from them, and anything that you wish you would have done when you were first starting out. I would love to hear your story as well, so feel free to get in contact if you would like to share. I have found that listening to stories and taking something from them are quite valuable.

Thanks for reading, and I wish you all a wonderful day.

Best Regards,
Frank

Hi, Frank, thanks for sharing your story. It’s nice to see that even after your negative experience, you still remained positive and decided to educate yourself and devote to the great world of Forex. Now you know that those people who offer winning strategies or Holy Grails are nothing more but scams. To be fair you got out with quite a small loss considering the average size (few thousand and more) of the sums that these scams manage to steal from their clients. Make sure to check the babypips school here and browse through the different sections and threads. Almost everything has already been discussed here and there are a lot of helpful people which will always give you a hand along the trading ride. Good luck :slight_smile:

Hi Frank, welcome to the forum.

There’s much wisdom and good judgment in your post above. :cool:

This, in particular, speaks highly of your chances.

I offer four links, in case any of them helps you …

This was how I learned.

These were my most reliable and helpful information-sources.

And these are the five classic mistakes which all successful traders [I]must[/I] eventually learn to avoid, in my opinion.

The “School” pages here are a good [B]starting-point[/B] (but of course they don’t pretend or claim in themselves equip you to trade profitably without a lot of further input and practice, too!): School of Pipsology | Learn Forex Trading

Good luck!