Everyone wants the freedom to work and travel, or be a digital nomad. We look at one of the best options – Financial Trading.
Living the global playboy lifestyle is expensive. But you don’t need to be chained to a desk to be making the money that earns you those wings.
Trading is one of the best ways to make big money. With a bit of money, some research and common sense you can be making damn good money from your laptop anywhere in the world.
What Is Stock Trading?
An effective trader will look at the global markets and be able to predict which stock is going up (bullish) and what is going down (bearish).
In simple terms, the financial markets include:
- Forex or foreign exchange (US Dollar etc),
- Stocks and equities (individual company stocks such as Apple, Facebook etc),
- Commodities (oil, silver, gold etc),
- Indexes or indices (FTSE 100, Dow Jones, S&P) and
- cryptocurrency (Bitcoin etc).
Effectively, by trading on any of the markets above you are gambling on which way the price of a particular stock or share is going to go.
For example if you’ve been keeping an eye on the markets and you think that the value of the Dow Jones is going to go up, you might buy shares.
Contract for difference (CFD)
To access the markets you normally need hundreds of thousands of Dollars/Pounds, but you can get started using CFDs. The contract for difference (CFD) allows you to effectively place a bet on the market movement without actually buying the stock required. You also benefit from the fact that you can use a smaller amount of money to speculate on a larger market movement.
In layman’s terms, you put down $100 but you’re speculating on the market movement of $1000. Meaning your returns (or losses) can be maximised.
Some of the financial trading tools can be relatively complicated (futures, which I’m not going to try to explain here), but forex is a great entry point for traders.
Currency trading is referred to as Forex (foreign exchange) and is often one of the easiest and safest ways into trading.
How Much Money Can I Make?
The profits can be huge. See films like ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ for a success story (although of course that’s a tale of a guy who went a bit too far…).
But it doesn’t have to be sleazy men in suits conning old ladies out of their savings. You can start with a few hundred or thousand of your pocket change and invest in safe stocks until you get the hang of it.
Successful traders are on hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. And many of them travel the world staying in awesome beach pads or city apartments.
How Do I Get In To Being A Stock Trader?
Like anything, you do need to be patient and start at the bottom. If you’re good with spotting patterns or algorithms or you like to take a chance on things then stock trading might be for you.
There are many stock trader sites where you can get started, often with play money while you get the hang of it.
SureTrader gives you a free 100K free play money to experiment. And when you’re ready you can start trading with penny shares and work your way up.
Any Advice For Aspiring Stock Traders?
Read the business dailies like the Financial Times or the business sections of international papers such as City AM (London) or the Wall Street Journal (NYC). These often have clues about what is happening with the financial markets that you can use to your advantage.
Practice with small trades until you are ready to move up to the big leagues.
Learnt the lingo. Bullish, bearish, pips, spread, liquid market… All terms you will get familiar with.
Start today… It will take you time to perfect your trader style and there’s no time like the present to plan your future!
