Re: How long does it take to learn trading
Learning how to trade is not difficult. Simply open up an account with a broker and start buying or selling stock. Stock transactions take 3 days to clear, so if you have a cash (non-margin) account you will need to wait 3 days after a sale for the funds to be available before you can buy another stock with those funds (
http://invest-faq.com/cbc/trade-free-ride.html). If you have less than $25,000 in your account you are going to be restricted from day trading. Accounts with less than $25,000 are not allowed to have more than 4 round trip trades in any 5 day period.
What you're most likely more interested in is how to make money trading. I hate to speak for anyone else, but I think that most of the people that use StockStop practice some form of technical analysis (TA), in that we believe that the direction of a stock can be inferred based on previous action, or other signals that are available by looking at a stock chart. The most common forms of TA deal with trend lines, Moving Averages, RSI, MACD and stochastic oscillators. A quick google of any one of those will give you an idea of what they do any how they can be used. You should be able to pick up the basics in a pretty short time.
You also asked about paper trading in a separate post, so I'll answer that here as well. Most, if not all, brokers have an area where you can practice trading with real time quotes but fake money. It's a good way to tell if your system works, but be advised that it's a lot easier to lose paper money than real money. And one final thing that you should always remember is to
not trade any money that you cannot afford to lose.
