If you want to learn stock trading, it’s important to realize it takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a lot of studying and learning from your mistakes. Only the strong survive in the trading world, so give yourself the time you deserve. When we began our journeys here at the Bullish Bears to learn stock trading, we weren’t happy with what we found in the industry. The Bullish Bears decided to start a community with the priority of helping you first, not lining our pockets. We had always kept in mind what we were searching for when we were beginners, and the industry severely lacked it.
How Do I Learn Stock Trading?
From learning stock trading for beginners to the advanced, it’s all here for you in our free stock trading courses. You’ll learn the basics, candlesticks, and patterns along with technical analysis, all the way up to advanced options strategies and day trading. You’ll be armed with the knowledge to trade in any market conditions. You can make your own trading decisions without the help of a guru or mentor. But you will make many friends who ultimately will be here for you to keep things positive and allow you to flourish in an environment where you can succeed.
This is the type of community we wished we had when we started. Unfortunately, it didn’t exist for us then, but it does exist for us now.
Navigating the stock market can be difficult because there are a lot of terms and trading concepts to learn. This page has a lot of our top ‘how-to’ guides. Also, if there’s an article you want us to write or add here, then feel free to contact us and let us know what topic you’d like to learn about. Make sure to search our website first to see if we’ve already written about it.
Learn the Basics of Stock Trading
There are two schools of thought when you learn stock trading as a beginner. That’s the investing approach vs. the trading approach. Many people are familiar with investing and building wealth. That’s how we build our retirement funds. Things like mutual funds and 401 (k) s are important to have.
We often have an investment portfolio through the companies we work for. Other times, we take matters into our own hands and start our investment accounts. We often have an investment broker or financial adviser who handles our needs.
What a trader does is much different, though. It’s very hands-on, and there are multiple strategies they may use to be successful. If you don’t learn stock trading in the proper ways, then it becomes incredibly risky. However, with proper risk management and discipline, trading can be very profitable if done right.
The Bullish Bears community offers a trading service to our community members. Trading is our primary focus. We aren’t financial advisers and don’t tell our members where to invest their money. We teach you to read charts and recommend you use certain tools to make decisions, but ultimately, don’t play games when it comes to investing. You can stick to back-tested and proven practices, or you can contact a trusted professional advisor.
How to Learn Stock Trading Step by Step
Understand the Stock Market Basics
Start by learning what stocks are, how exchanges work, what market orders and limit orders are, and the difference between investing and trading.
Learn How to Read Stock Charts
Become comfortable with candlesticks, price action, volume, support and resistance, trends, and basic chart patterns.
Learn the Major Trading Strategies
Study strategies such as swing trading, day trading, momentum trading, breakout trading, and trend following. You don’t need to trade every strategy.
Learn Risk Management
Risk management is important and should happen before trying to maximize profits. Learn position sizing, stop-loss orders, risk-to-reward ratios, and how much of your account you’re willing to risk on an individual trade.
Choose a Trading Platform
Learn how to use a brokerage platform and its charting, order-entry, watchlist, and scanning tools. Practice placing different order types before risking real money.
Build a Watchlist
Rather than trying to trade everything, develop a process for finding stocks that meet your criteria. Look at liquidity, volume, volatility, price action, and catalysts.
Create a Trading Plan
Your trading plan should define your setups, entry criteria, stop placement, profit targets, position sizing, maximum daily loss, and rules for when you will stay out of the market.
Practice With Paper Trading
Paper trading lets you practice your strategy without using your real money. Treat the practice account seriously and follow the same rules you would use with real money.
Start Small When Going Live
Once you’ve developed and tested a process, consider starting with small position sizes. The goal initially should be learning how you execute under real-market conditions rather than trying to make large profits.
Keep a Trading Journal
Record your entry, exit, setup, position size, market conditions, profit or loss, and your emotions and decisions.
Learn How Stock Orders Work
When it comes to learning stock trading, you need to understand order types. They will affect the type of trades you place. In essence, there are three you should know.
Market Order: This is an order that tells your broker to buy or sell a security immediately at the best price you can get. You might not get the best price, but your order will get filled.
Limit Order: This is an order that has a specific price you want an order to fill at. You can choose what price you want to buy or sell a stock at. That might mean you have to wait a while for the order to fill.
Stop Order: This order includes a stop-out price that will trigger once and close once the price has reached your goal.
Learning market, limit, and stop orders and how they can affect your profit and loss on a trade will help you make the best decision for the type of trade you want to place.
Choosing a Broker
TradeStation, TD Ameritrade, and Interactive Brokers are good brokers if you’re a casual day trader. Suppose you’re going to be aggressive as a day trader and have the funds, then LightSpeed, SpeedTrader, or Centerpoint Securities. Also, check out the CMEG group if you’re looking to day trade. They allow you to day trade, their fees are low, and there’s no PDT rule.
If you’re looking to buy shares of a stock or trade options, ThinkorSwim is solid. Their fees are a bit higher; however, they are worth it if you make smart trades. If you will be a casual, long-term trader, then TradeStation, TD Ameritrade, and Fidelity are solid brokers to use.
Reading is really important to your growth as a trader. Having the proper mindset and knowing how to overcome the emotions of trading will be one of the most important lessons. Learning technical analysis and candlesticks is also very important, but that comes second to knowing how to control your emotions when trading.
Take trading seriously and invest in yourself. Study and put the time in that trading deserves. Like in college…you don’t get a degree in your first semester. Trading is the same way. It takes many traders several months, if not one year+, to become comfortable and profitable, so go easy on yourself if it takes time to overcome the learning curves with trading. It’s a normal part of the process when you learn stock trading.
Understanding Volatility When Stock Trading
Stock scanners hunt for volume and volatility within stocks, and traders are hunters of volatility. Scanners will save you a lot of time by doing lots of research. Again, start with free scanners, then work up to scanners like Trade Ideas or Black Box Stocks when you have the budget.
TrendSpider is hands down the most incredible automated charting platform in the industry. They do all the heavy lifting of drawing trend lines and mapping out support and resistance for you. Mapping out support and resistance is the key to becoming a successful trader, and TrendSpider is the innovator in making this process much easier. Read our TrendSpider Review.
Stocks move many times based on breaking news, and having a reliable breaking news service can be a game-changer in trading. Benzinga Pro is our favorite news wire service.
Stock news hits the newswires before it hits the scanners. Scanners hunt for volatility (stock volume), so newswires can help you get a trader’s edge and a potential position before the herd comes in. If you want to learn more, check out our Benzinga Pro Review.
Commodities and Futures
The commodities sector is a very popular trading and investing sector. The most popular commodities are gold, silver, oil, energy, and natural gas. Commodities and commodity futures are very popular among both traders and investors.
What is the commodity sector? It is primarily stocks or futures that deal with goods. These “goods” could be raw or partly refined materials whose value mainly reflects the costs of searching, acquiring, or producing them for the market. Other examples of commodities are corn, beef, grains, cotton, and other minerals like uranium. So, whether you’re a trader or investor, it’s still critical to know how to chart a stock before entering any trade.
Related Trading Courses
Related Trading Guides
Learn Stock Trading in Our Community
We teach how to “trade” stocks, options, and futures in our trading rooms. That means we teach support and resistance, charting, order entry, implementation, and the psychology behind trading. We also provide a community of support to help along the trading journey. Our live stream is the best way to learn stock trading because it’s real-time, and you can ask questions and see what we are thinking and the WHY behind trading. This makes for an invaluable educational experience as a trader.
Again, we say it repeatedly, but we will continue to repeat it: we are not a stock-pumping service and don’t call out entries and exits on low-float, easy-to-manipulate trades. Using a trade room to pump a position and make you look like a rock star is morally wrong. We teach our community members how to become self-sufficient traders. Our live trading stream helps teach you how to learn stock market trading. So, if you’re looking to learn stock trading and are willing to put in the effort, then our community will be a great fit for you.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Take trading courses on your trading style
- Read books on your trading strategy
- Start paper trading
- Treat your virtual account like a real account
- Keep tight stop losses
- Learn from other like-minded traders in trade rooms
- Get a financial advisor
- Start investing in your 401 (k) or IRA
- Invest your spare change with a company like Acorns or Stash
- Take basic stock trading courses
- Save money to put into a brokerage account
- Look into ETFs or trading large-cap options
- Practice paper trading first
- Slowly start trading with real money
- The amount of money that you need to buy stocks when trading differs based on trading style
- You can start trading with $100 – $1,000 to start small and slowly grow an account.
- Options traders should shoot to have around $2,500-$5,000 to get started
- Day traders require a minimum balance of $25,000 to avoid the pattern day trading (PDT) rule
- If you are an active trader and want to use your account as leverage to trade, then it’s helpful to have at least $25,000
Many traders who get rich by trading stocks; however, it’s the exception and not the norm. Trading is hard, and most traders fail. Learning how to trade is a mental game. It’s not just learning about the technicals. It’s more about learning how to overcome your emotions. That doesn’t mean that you can’t make it. It just means that you must have the proper expectations when starting.
