What to study, in what order, and what to ignore for the first year.
Key takeaways
- Learn market mechanics and costs before strategy.
- One instrument, one strategy, one journal for the first six months.
- Ignore signal groups; they prevent the feedback loop that produces skill.
Months one to two: mechanics. Order types, settlement, margins, costs, contract specifications and how your platform behaves under load. Boring, and the foundation of everything.
Months three to four: risk. Position sizing, expectancy, drawdown arithmetic and journaling. Learn to lose correctly before learning to win, because the first year will supply plenty of practice.
Months five to eight: one strategy on one instrument, traded at minimum size, journaled completely. Resist the urge to sample new methods; a sample of one hundred trades in one approach is worth more than ten samples of ten.
Months nine to twelve: review and refine. Compute expectancy and adherence, fix execution, then consider scaling size or adding a second setup.
Throughout, avoid tip groups and signal services. They remove the feedback loop between decision and outcome, which is the only mechanism by which skill actually develops.
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