Your first 30 days — a concrete plan
Week by week, what to do and what not to. The plan is deliberately slow, because the fast version is the one that ends in week two.
Everything up to here was knowledge. This is a schedule. It is deliberately unhurried — the compressed version of this plan is the one that ends with an empty account and the conclusion that trading is a scam.
Week 1 — understand, do not trade
- Re-read Lessons 2 and 3. Learn to read a candle and know which product you intend to trade.
- Spend twenty minutes a day just watching one instrument on an H1 chart. No orders. You are learning what normal movement looks like.
- Write your four-line plan: what I trade / when I enter / where the stop goes / how much I risk.
- Decide your maximum-loss number — the amount you could lose entirely with no consequence to your life.
Do not deposit anything this week. Nothing you can learn in week one is improved by having money at stake.
Week 2 — demo, at your real size
- Open a demo and set the balance to your intended real deposit. Not $10,000.
- Take three to five trades a day, maximum. Every one with a stop loss set before entry.
- Journal every trade: what, why, risk, result, feeling. One line each.
- Run the numbers through the risk and position size calculators until sizing is automatic.
Do not judge yourself on profit this week. The only question is whether you followed your own rules.
Week 3 — the graduation test
- Continue on the demo. Target 20 trades with zero rule violations.
- A violation — a widened stop, an oversized position, a trade past your daily limit — resets the counter to zero. That reset is the point of the exercise.
- Review the journal at the end of the week and find your single most expensive habit. Everyone has one and it is visible by trade twenty.
- Run the platform checklist from Lesson 9 on whichever platform you are considering, including the support test.
Week 4 — a first real deposit, small
- Only if you passed the test. If you did not, week 4 is another week 3, and that is a normal outcome, not a failure.
- Deposit the smallest amount that is workable — the number you wrote down in week 1, or less. First deposits are tuition, not capital.
- Immediately run a withdrawal test: withdraw a small amount and confirm it arrives. Do this before you are emotionally invested.
- Trade at 1% risk, three trades a day maximum, and stop for the day after three losses or 5% down.
- Expect the first live week to go worse than the demo. Everyone's does. That gap is the emotional half you could not rehearse.
What success looks like at day 30
Not a profit. At day 30 you should be able to say: I know what I trade and why, I have never risked more than 1% on a trade, I have never moved a stop against myself, I have journalled every trade, and I have successfully withdrawn money from my platform.
If all five are true and your balance is slightly down, you are ahead of the overwhelming majority of people who started the same month. The account balance at day 30 is mostly noise; the habits are the asset, and they are the only thing that compounds.
What to do next
- Keep the journal going for at least three months before changing anything about your method.
- Increase position size only when your account balance grows — never because you feel confident.
- Read your four-line plan at the start of every session. It takes ten seconds and it is the cheapest insurance in trading.
- Revisit Lesson 6 monthly. The six mistakes come back, quietly, as soon as you stop watching for them.