What is the best way to learn about finance? I can save up roughly £1000 a month...

What is the best way to learn about finance? I can save up roughly £1000 a month, what is the best way to invest that money and yield profits? How do I learn to trade? How did you get into Jow Forums related stuff? I'm pretty responsible with money, I don't spend it frivously, but I'm obviously not a retard who thinks that living on borderline poverty for 20 something years to "retire" at 40 is a good tradeoff.

Attached: wands02.jpg (350x600, 84K)

Mumbai Municipal Potty Training Academy Of The Arts, sir.

Attached: doge.jpg (625x452, 52K)

Maybe it's because I'm relatively new, but trading comes across as gambling. You basically buy low and hope it goes high as fuck and then sell. No one ever seems to know when a huge spike will occur so it basically seems to come down to researching a company, it sounding like they are creating a good niche, you throw money, and hope they do well

Where do I even begin to research this? Any good books or useful videos?

Best way to learn finance in a theoretical sense is to buy some used textbooks and supplement what you read with YouTube videos and Investopedia videos. Start a business though and you'll learn REALLY quick that those books would be mighty fucking thin if they got rid of the stuff you'll likely never use in a real world scenario. There's theoreticians, there's practitioners, and I suppose there's blends of the two, but business is practice. You don't just study a book and become a millionaire. It's trial and error and failure while moving forward. Psychological resilience, grit, all that shit.

This is even further the case when learning to trade because 99.9% (and I'd say 100% but I want to be generous) of educators, books, learning materials etc. are bullshit, period. No fucking arguments on this. If all you had to do was read a book or take a class and that would let you be a consistently profitable trader, then everyone would take the course, read the books, etc. and achieve financial freedom. The majority of it is bullshit. They'll advocate journaling, meditation, all sorts of nonsense. It's all bullshit. Maybe the single most important thing you can really learn is risk/money management. After that though, you need to get in the trenches and build experience at small size, demonstrate you can do it, and then learn to scale.

So basically, to get good at a thing, you need to do the thing and you need to accept you'll suck for a bit. The whole game is making the cost of doing it cheap enough that a) you survive the learning curve and b) you have less of a hole to dig yourself out of when/if you successfully build the skills. Once you have the skills/experience the money will come. Your wealth will be a foregone conclusion, but you need the skills/experience, so make sure you're not paying a lot to obtain them. Reading is just a safety blanket for people too scared to actually take the risks required to develop the skills to make the money they want.

Stocks is pretty good for TA, but crypto is a mess, the BART formation basically is impossible to predict

The only trend is that BTC is going low, but it's impossible to see when it will break up because the BART doesn't even give you time to adapt before it actually went up or down

I'm purely interested in what trading is in itself, if that makes sense.

My girlfriend has a pretty solid idea for business, however that is not possible to be put into any sort of action until a year or two later, so for now I'm interested in what I can do with my surplus.

To get to point, the most useful thing I could ask you is this: how did *you* get into this?

I don't mind risks, it's only money I'm losing.

It's all money management/risk management. Trading is a cult for most people. They don't question anything and then 95% of them fail and they're flabbergasted at how that happened. Reminiscences of a Stock Operator is like the Holy Bible for traders. It makes them all develop this fascination with Jesse Livermore and yet the book could be nothing more than mountains of bullshit because it wasn't even written by Livermore. The majority of people don't even read the book of the guy they learn to functionally worship by reading Reminiscences. Likewise you have people that say "woah, you have to buy break outs by buying at the top of consolidation!" and you have other people that say "woah, you have to sell break outs by selling at the top of consolidation!" So are you buying at the bottom of congestion/consolidation and selling at the top of it or vice versa? The trend is your friend? Right?

Well ask 10 different traders how to define a trend and you'll get 10 different answers and the majority of those answers won't even fucking matter because if you followed the trend in the way they advocate you would never be able to meaningfully structure risk without eventually bombing your account. Day trading is impossible right? Except quite a few people do it successfully, so how is it impossible? You see what I'm getting at here? The only unifying thing I have ever found in trading is risk management and money management. It is the one thing that everyone seems to agree on. Your perceived probability of success on a current position and your history of your success (are you consistently profitable) inform you of the size that you should trade and you should still always err on the side of caution by having a capital preservation system in place. Trade bigger when you're doing well, trade smaller when you're doing poorly and never risk more than you have to. Other than that it's the same usual contradictory shit.

You can use coinbase pro (coinbase app has a fee. I like it more but best to use the pro version online), binance (trade platform), robinhood (trade platform. Has like 2 crypto currency only tho. Mostly just stocks), blockfolio(trade platform), nyse market (news), and crypto market cap

I don't even want to make the claim that I've "got" it because the journey never seems to end, but the most meaningful portions of my development were experience based almost exclusively; actual trading. Feeling the emotions of a loss, seeing my stats and knowing what I needed to fix, running into problems and coming up with solutions, failing, continuing to get back up, and keep looking for solutions.

I read more books, listened to more podcasts, and watched more videos than some people will in a life time. I worked on or thought about trading almost every waking moment of my life. I at one point had a couple THOUSAND pages of journals before realizing I wasn't really getting better at trading, but I sure as fuck was getting better at writing journals. I could legitimately start a trader "education" course joining the ranks of all the snake oil salesmen based on my theoretical knowledge alone and sound like the Jesus Christ of trading.

Now with that said, it's hard to know where I'd be if I never did any of that theoretical stuff. I spit on most of it because it really seems like the most important stuff for me has been actually trading. But maybe part of the journey is just navigating your own private maze and mapping it out in a way that no one else can really tell you 100% how to do. All of the stuff I look at bitterly thinking didn't help me at all may have had just enough nuggets of wisdom to put me on a path I wouldn't otherwise have been on.

I'll continue with my personal advice in the follow up to this...

If it were up to me, from a theoretical standpoint I would absolutely stress risk/money management. Focus your book reading and studying on that, but be aware you'll also see why/how it works when you begin to trade in ways you never imagined. I'd say maybe read a couple books on technical and fundamental analysis so you aren't rediscovering the wheel, but keep your guard very fucking heavily up.

That subject alone is another contradiction where some people say "fundamentals don't mean anything, it's all priced in!" and others say "technicals don't mean anything, it's all tea lives and cloud watching!" and yet once again people from both camps make money. If you want to listen to podcasts, those are out there in droves: Two Blokes Trading (both hosts failed to be successful traders), Trading Story Podcast (host failed to become a successful trader), Chat With Traders (very humble guy), Better System Trader, and so on and so on and so on.

After that I'd say trade on a demo account for a couple months and record your results. Prioritize experience and learning from experience. You can supplement with books, but again, most of them I think are shit. FIND A MENTOR if possible and one that won't charge you money to be their friend because once again, you're looking to break into the most snake oil filled industry I can think of short of MLM and Nigerian royalty.

I don't personally think you need to be consistently profitable before trading live, but when you go live trade small. The idea is that with real money on the line you'll be exposed more to the emotions of fear and greed which (again another contradiction) some people say you miss out on in demo trading. The main idea though is you are just learning to throw some punches, so don't step into the ring with Floyd Mayweather in a fight to the death. You earn your way up there by demonstrating you can trade smaller size. You earn it by statistically demonstrating you have skill. The numbers won't lie.

Trader user has given you some amazing advice, but... just buy Vanguard ETFs via a Stocks and Shares ISA. You’ll save yourself a world of pain and make £££

Thanks for the solid, realistic advice.
Can you elaborate?

You seem a really legit dude, what do you do for a living?

>Writes paragraphs about him spending all his time becoming a trader
>Durr wut U do??

For fucks sake, can you use your brain for once.

I've spent a few years trying and failing before finally giving up. I think I'm firmly in wantrepreneur territory. I try an idea out, barely break even after a few months, drop it. I'm happy enough with the waging hard saving hard thing now. Comfii to know a day off is actually a day off. Idea is I'll retire at 40 working part time paycheck to paycheck while my nestegg grows. I get about $1500/wk and live with my grandparents. Only expense is food, car, and occasionally seeing this girl who is/isn't my long distance gf every few weeks. She's been hell on my savings but all things considered I'm still socking away far more than average for my demographic.

You typed this, yet you still used "there is" instead of "there are." Why

read Taleb and Soros

Alchemy of Finane by Soros. Heavy textbook read.

That would be an obvious conclusion that you were a trader as a dayjob. Perhaps you would be doing it as a side income or something to supplement your main income, hence my question.