The more you trade, the more you will learn about the world around you. You will gradually start to better understand the global economy, national economy, business in general, and how things work. Traders view the world in a different light, pondering how the goods and services we need and want are created and ultimately delivered to us at a reasonable profit. Every time you buy something, every time you interact with someone, your mind will constantly be sifting everything for trading opportunities.
Learning is naturally empowering and self-feeding, the more you know the more you want to know. And knowledge and diligence ultimately lead to success, which builds self-confidence. Once you start making money trading stocks, and you will if you apply yourself and stick with it, your whole worldview starts to change. As your income becomes less dependent on your time on task, as the markets reward you for the merit of your own decisions, I guarantee you will feel better about yourself and life in general.
And this gift of learning extends far beyond the external, markets and stocks. The greatest challenges for trading lie in your own heart. Your success depends on harnessing your own internal greed and fear, your greatest enemies. As naturally-emotional creatures, mastering our own emotions isn’t easy. But the more you trade, the more you will learn about yourself. It literally forces you to look deep into your own heart, to try and dispassionately analyze the motivating forces driving your buying and selling decisions.
If you are a parent, I’m sure you want your kids to excel in all these critical life traits. Trading is a great way to teach them! Start your kids out young, it’s easy and fun. When you take them out to their favorite restaurant, talk with them about the process of getting the food to their plates. Tell them about all the workers from the farmers to the truckers to the cooks, who labor hard and earn a profit for their part in the food chain. If the restaurant is publicly-traded, explain to your kids that they can own a small piece of this business themselves!
Trading is incredibly liberating, breaking a crushing bond that enslaves most people their entire lives. Trading divorces income earned from time on task. Salaried or not, we are all essentially paid to work by the hour. But this is a problem, it creates an artificial ceiling on our incomes since our time is precious and finite. We can only devote so many hours each week to work before our lives become an unbalanced, unhappy disaster. We effectively become financial slaves to our time available for work.
Trading also develops the wonderful ability to take the long view. The tyranny of the present is intense in this Information Age, everyone worries incessantly about today while carelessly ignoring the past and the future. Trading forces you to transcend today’s worries to see the big picture. In order to buy low and sell high, you have to consider any stock’s history and future potential. This grows into a universal life-wide ability to keep the present in proper perspective, to not dwell on today’s challenges out of proper context.
I’ve always viewed trading as analogous to the wondrous Age of Discovery when great tall ships plied the world’s oceans with exotic trading goods. They would sail to Asia at great risk and expense, and bring back spices to Europe that would fetch a fortune. Traders bought goods where the supply was plentiful to transport them to where demand was great. Stock trading today is like sailing the oceans of time. We buy trade goods (stocks) today, and hope that demand for them (and hence their prices) will be higher in the future.
Trading demands discipline, which has unimaginably-big benefits in all aspects of life. In order to trade, you first have to generate some surplus income. The only way to do this is spend less than you earn. The longer that you live below your means in general, the more you save, the richer you get. This trading-forged discipline virtually ensures you will never have debt problems, never be in an ugly situation where you risk losing a major asset like your house. It leads to a much-happier and less-stressful life.
The markets could not care less about your background, your education, your faith, your age, your appearance, your sex, or any real or perceived shortcomings in your life. All that matters is your own decisions. Trading may very well be the last true meritocracy on the planet, where everyone is free to thrive or fail based solely on their own drive. If you diligently strive to learn the art of trading, you can and will grow successful regardless of where you came from, where you are, or what limitations have burdened you.
The amount traded is totally irrelevant. If you can earn a 20% return on $1000 in your earlier years, you can earn a 20% return on $100k or $1m as your capital grows. The critical thing is just to get trading, start small and start learning the lessons stock trading teaches. Get your greed and fear under control and grow your understanding of the markets and stocks when you have little on the line. This foundation is essential to help you thrive someday in the future when you are risking a lot.
Learning the stock market is not hard at: http://pressroom.prlog.org/LeeSmith/ and http://www.onlineprnews.com/rss/pr/?cid=2730