As the title of this article says, the moment of truth has come… The time has come to operate with a real account.
In this exciting journey, you have gone from being a person without much knowledge about trading to having all the tools ready to start trading in the right direction.
In this article, I will give you a series of tips and tricks so that you can start trading without fear and with clear objectives. Let’s go there!
Start trading
After validating your strategy in the broker’s demo account for several weeks, it is time to put into practice everything you have learned by trading with the account with real money.
Now you will understand what I have explained so many times about trading psychology. Although it is true that with the demo account you have done the psychological exercise of thinking that you are operating with real money, the pressure in each operation you will begin to feel from now on.
On the other hand, when you start trading with real money, you must have absolute control over your broker’s tools. When trading, the speed of execution of buy orders, sell orders and moving stop loss and take profit signals are crucial for successful trading.
Unlike what you will have seen on social networks and in the movies, a trader does not need 4 screens to trade, although it is very good cinematographically. The number of screens is equivalent to the amount of information we have in front of us, and at first, you will need all your attention to focus on little information.
A screen with one or two graphics is more than enough for the start. When you have control over two open trades simultaneously, you can try more, but think that saturating is counterproductive. I recommend that you focus on a maximum of two operations.
Top 4 tips for trading
If you are about to take action, you are in the right place. Here are the best tips to get started with trading.
1. Select the broker that best suits your needs
My number one piece of advice is that you select the broker that best suits your needs. There is no definitive broker for everyone, but you must determine what your preferences are as a trader and choose the best broker based on that.
If you ask a Ferrari fan what car they recommend you buy, they may recommend the latest supercar from the Italian brand. However, if you live in a rural area and your preferences for your car are an affordable price, low consumption and that it is 4×4, a Ferrari is definitely not your car. The exact same thing happens with some brokers.
On the other hand, there are many variables: the minimum capital to invest, commissions, reliability, leverage, access to different markets, interactive graphics, customer service… Choose well what your priorities are before selecting your broker.
2. Be disciplined with your trading strategy
Being disciplined with your strategy is not only more profitable in the long term, but it also allows you to assume much less pressure on a psychological level, since you only have to operate based on your strategy when the signals indicate so.
Trading instinctively and impulsively is the first step to losing money on the stock market. If we combine this way of operating with leverage, the outcome can be very significant losses, to the point of losing all the money invested.
3. Manage risk well
Risk management is also key so that bad streaks do not end up destroying your capital. I usually risk 2% of my capital per operation. That means that if my account is €10,000, I will not risk more than €200 per trade.
In the table we can see that with this risk management, if we lose continuously for 10 or more times, the risk we assume is less and less, thus limiting the probability of leaving our account to zero.
On the other hand, we have the advantage that the risk is always a fixed percentage (2%). This helps us to operate in different markets and with accounts of very different sizes.
4. Control your psychology to control your operations
Psychology in trading we have already said on many occasions that it is the factor that most influences the long-term viability of the trader. There is no magic trick in the psychological section, it is simply a matter of trading, analyzing market behavior and working internally so that the operation affects your emotions less and less.
Humility is key to being a good trader. Staying calm when you experience a losing streak, and controlling greed when everything goes well, are two great lessons that often appear in psychologically extreme situations.
Conclusions
Now is the time to draw conclusions from everything we have talked about in this article, and I think we can summarize it with the following ideas:
Get away from trading emotions. The decisions we make based on our impulses, our ideas and our feelings are often inappropriate because they are decisions that are not made based on statistical analysis.
Select the right broker. In the same way that a taxi driver needs to buy a car in which he feels comfortable, is cheap to maintain and allows him to reach any point, our broker must meet a series of requirements based on our preferences.
Be disciplined with our strategy. This will allow us to take advantage of the statistical advantage of our strategy and meet the challenge of making money consistently on the stock market.
And now it’s your turn! Put all these tips into practice in your operations and tell us about your experience in the comments. Between all of us, we are sure that we can solve the doubts that arise.
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