Because it's the beginning of the month, the birds are chirping, and you want to become a baller day trader, and speed off to retirement in your lamborghini.

Just kidding, I can't promise you lamborghinis, but maybe some corollas.

Intro

Even if you have zero knowledge in trading, I'll be sharing with you what I did when I first started, and how you can get set up, and by the time you're done watching this video, you'll know a direction of what to do with your day trading journey, and hopefully turn this into a full time career.

If that sounds good to you, make sure to smash the like button for more beginner friendly videos

If you're new to this channel, welcome. My name is Shae, the humble trader. I've been a full time day trader for over 8 years now. People know me for my no BS trading lessons, strategies, and my bad jokes, involving my ex husband, Mike Bagholder.

A common misconception about trading is that it's all about buying nice lamborghinis and penthouse suites. But no, it's so much more than that. So let's get into it.

Here is how to become a day trader in 30 days.

Week number one, and your first step is to keep your day job.

Alright, this is a very important step for you to get started as a day trader the right way.

When I first started trading, I was working full time in VFX film industry.

Even though I absolutely hated my 9-5 job, hold up, it was more like a 9-7 job, let's be real.

But the full time job was very necessary for me.

Thankfully I get to use my employment income at the time to replenish my day trading account during that very painful process. And because I kept my job,

I never have to worry about making enough profit from day trading to live.

Which was very important for my mental and emotional health, and allowed me to take the time to learn and experiment with learning new strategies in trading. I'm not quite sure how long it usually takes for new traders to become profitable.

If you have a figure in your mind, please do let me know down below.

But for me, it took me over 2 years to become consistently profitable.

Remember, most beginner traders lose money. It's almost inevitable.

So it's very important that you have another stream of revenue so you can survive, while you are climbing that very steep learning curve in trading.

Step 2. Learn for free.

The next step I would recommend you to take during that 30 day process to become a day trader, is to consume as much free day trading content as possible.

There's tons of free resources available online.

With the internet, you can get started with whatever information you want at your fingertips.

YouTube and Reddit were really the two sources of free information and content when I first started. I used to spend hours there looking at people's recaps or trading strategies.

Besides those, here are some of my favorite resources.

Video playlists for beginner day traders on YouTube, free market research websites such as finviz, and of course the finviz screener.

I would use that to research for stocks to potentially play the next day.

For stock market news articles, I would look at Yahoo Finance, Seeking Alpha,

Bloomberg, and of course finviz once again.

For free charting tools, I would use tradingview and thinkorswim.

And now many years later, I have also created an extensive playlist for beginner day traders in recommended orders for you. And all of that is available for you to watch for free.

Besides that, I also have a free weekly watchlist that I send out every Sunday.

The emails will go through some of the current market news of the week, and provide you with analysis of the top 4 stocks that are worth watching in the coming week.

I'll leave links to sign up down below.

Again, the playlist and the weekly emails are free to sign up.

Now at this stage, you're probably thinking,

OK Shea, I'm keeping my job, I have money saved up, and I signed up to your free emails and watching your videos. Let's start trading.

Not so fast. That was the easy part.

Now comes the hard part. Remembering to smash the like button.

Ok, just kidding. But if you are serious about day trading as a career, please leave any questions you may have down below, and I'll do my best to answer them.

Now moving on to the next part of your 30 day journey to become a day trader.

Step 3. Paper trading and opening a brokerage account.

Paper trading means you are trading with fake simulated money.

And why should you trade with fake money first? Well the reality is, if you are brand new to trading, you are probably going to lose money first.

Like I mentioned earlier in the video, I lost a lot of money when I first started trading.

That's the reason during your first week right now,

I would recommend you or any new traders to open a simulated trading account, also known as paper trading.

And I know your follow up question must be,

OK humble trader, which broker do you recommend to start with paper trading?

Well, there are many choices to choose from. To get you started, here are some of my recommendations.

First of all, tradingview. This has now become my favorite charting platform, surpassing thinkorswim. I really like its versatility across platforms.

It's available on your phones, PC, Macbook, and since it's a web based platform, it's available to anyone around the world.

Best of all, you can get started with it with a free version online.

I use it to point out my technical analysis on specific stocks in the evenings.

And if you do require market data, it's at an additional cost of around $15 a month.

Tradingview has gone through a ton of transformations over the years.

You can now connect it with a whole list of brokers once you're ready to go live.

I really do like the interface a lot as you've seen me use it in so many of my YouTube videos.

The second recommended broker for paper trading is Webull, which is a free commission broker platform.

While I do not recommend free commission broker apps for live day trading, for paper trading, it's totally fine. Especially if you're brand new and want to just get started with paper trading and learning charting and technical analysis.

The user interface on Webull is very beginner friendly. I personally use their mobile app to track the stocks I'm watching on the go. They offer free live market data, so that's definitely a bonus. They are also available on desktop platforms on both PC and Mac.

Another good option for paper trading is Interactive Brokers, available in US,

Canada, and many countries in Asia and Europe.

Interactive Brokers is probably the stock trading broker with the most extensive global footprint.

With Interactive Brokers, you do need to purchase their live market data subscriptions in order to receive live quotes. I believe the packages are about $20 to $25 a month, which is not bad at all.

If you do consider opening an account with Interactive Brokers, these will be the data packages to purchase, for both paper trading and live trading.

So those are my recommendations for paper trading. But when you're ready to open a live trading account, I would recommend these ones. Interactive Brokers, Trade Zero, and Centerpoint Securities.

I personally have accounts with all of the brokers and platforms I mentioned today.

You can check out all the links down below.

I'll say right now that there's no perfect broker out there. There are pros and cons for each one.

Some are only available in the US, and some are only suitable for bigger accounts.

But we'll have to discuss that in another video.

If you have questions about any of these brokers, feel free to ask me in the comment section below.

Now that you have your paper trading account and live trading account open with a broker, it's time to move on to the next step.

In week number two, you're going to take step number four, learning technical analysis.

Now that you know the basics of trading, and have a broker platform to work with, you have conquered one mountain. Now it's time to climb another one.

And that will be learning technical analysis.

And you can not complete learning technical analysis without understanding support and resistance levels when charting.

So that's where we're going to start with our trading view platform over here, looking at the stock NVIDIA.

Remember, support levels are historical price levels where buyers step in to buy the stock.

Therefore, you'll see the stock bounce off the same price multiple times in the past, because there are buyers around those areas to support the stock when it sold off to those levels.

So for a stock like NVIDIA, on the chart you can see a clear support around $2.10 over here.

That area, it's bounced off once, twice, multiple times before.

And also another clear level over here, when the stock has sold off to around $1.70 over here, and bounced off over here once, twice, three times in the past.

Another time here and here over the course of the last 12 months.

On the other hand, resistance levels are historical price areas when sellers step in to sell the stock.

So whenever you can see the stock run into those similar areas again, buyers decreased, and sellers decided to take profits or just get out of their position.

So a good example here is once again on NVIDIA, you can see that over here, the stock peaked out around the $2.29 area.

If you line that up back to historical price levels, you can see some similar selling pressure and resistance back here almost a year ago over here again as well.

In same area, you can see the stock had bounced before, off of our $1.70 support before, but then when it reached around this area $1.94, that's when it sold off around the $1.95, $1.94 area, and reached that same resistance once again a couple of months later, and the stock sold off.

Here are three quick tips for you when drawing support and resistance and basic technical analysis.

Find the extreme highs and lows, V shapes and W shapes on the chart.

So you want to find the most obvious points you're looking at, so in this case, the previous resistance that we drew, this is an obvious point of resistance over here when it peaked out and sold off.

So over here, so this is another V shape on the support area here, you can see the stock form a V shape on the sell off and bounce.

So this area is also another significant support.

Over here, once again, you have another V shape recovery here, so another area of support down here around $1.15.

And over here, when it forms an upside down V shape, when it peaked and sold off, that's another resistance.

Tip number two, you want to look for areas where the stock has contact points of at least two or three more times in the past before, the more the merrier.

So that's the reason you can see on our chart, all the levels that we've drawn, it's touched the stock at least three times.

Once over here on this level $1.94, once, twice, three, four times.

Same as resistance, once, twice, three times.

Support over here $1.40, once again over here.

Tip number three is to zoom out to the daily chart or the weekly chart.

There's just too many traders who are just focusing on the short term time frame during intraday trading.

You want to be looking at the bigger picture.

That's the reason we're looking at the daily chart.

And if you're swing trading, you want to be switching over here to the weekly chart.

That's what you should look at if you're swing trading.

If you actually made it this far into the video, let me know down in the comment section below, and remember to drop a like on the video if you find it very useful.

Drawing support and resistance is by no means the only technical analysis topic to study.

There's also price action, trend lines, and so much more.

If you want to learn more about it later on,

I have many more videos going in depth about this topic, so make sure to check out the videos listed down below.

Now in your third week, which is days 14 to 21 of your 30 day journey to becoming a day trader, you should focus on repeating the exact same process as mentioned in the previous steps.

Keep learning about trading and various strategies online using free resources, practicing technical analysis and familiarizing with your new trading platforms, then moving on to your fourth week.

Now its time to bring in the big dogs.

Step number 5, calculating your own risk management profile.

You know people always say, you should save the best for last.

This is certainly true for risk management in day trading.

I saved the best and the most crucial part for our step number 5.

Without risk management, you'll never become profitable, period. Even if you've done all the steps earlier.

The reality is, no one can predict whether a stock is going to go up or down with 100% certainty at any given time. Therefore, as traders, we can never truly control how much profit we make. But we can definitely control how much we lose.

And how do you actually implement risk management in your own trading?

Well I'll show you that right now.

Ok, so we're going to start with calculating your own personal risk profile according to your account size.

So you can see on this calculator here, if you are trading with a $5,000 account, and your max risk per trade should be anywhere from 1% to 3%.

1%, which is the example over here, will be someone who is very conservative.

If you are trading $5,000 using 1%, you should be only risking $50 per trade.

Or if you are a little more conservative, $50 per day.

If you take 2 trades per day, that means you are risking $25 per trade.

However, if you are more aggressive, then you can try using 2% or 3% risk per trade.

So in this case, if you are using the same $5,000, your risk per trade is $150.

And just change this figure to however your account size is.

Let's say if I'm trading a bigger account, $20,000, then I will probably risk around 1% to 2% for my own taste if I was starting out.

This will be the figure for your max risk per trade.

So that means for those trading a small account under $5,000, no more YOLOing and trying to risk $500 or $1,000 per trade.

You should be looking at these more conservative numbers here.

So now that you calculated how much you should be risking according to your account size,

I'm going to show you the relationship between risk to reward ratio and profitability.

So we are using the same $5,000 account as we had earlier, and we are risking 2% per trade.

Now in this first simulation over here, we are risking 1 to 1.

Meaning that when you are trying to make $100, you are risking that same $100.

So in this scenario, if your win rate is only about 50%, which is the case for most new traders, you can see that 5 out of 10 trades you lose $100, and 5 out of 10 trades you make $100.

You end up a losing trader. You are breakeven about negative $10, but this is not accounting into any fees or commissions.

And realistically for most new traders, the win rate is sometimes a lot lower, something closer to 40% or even 30%.

Then you can see, if you are risking 1 to 1, you won't be profitable.

In this second simulation over here, you can see we are still using the same 2% risk, but now the risk reward is skewed to 1 to 2.