Trading is a fantastic way of making money and many traders dream of trading for living. This is something many new traders have as their objective. But this reflects a part of difficulty or danger as just being a long term profitable trader is not an easy task and mostly looks like a hard challenge.
It needs the person to be very well capitalized, to remain as a successful trader or for the person who believes that he has the chance to successfully trade for the living over the long-term. Trading for a living is like starting a business which generally fails at a very high rate. It requires a high degree of knowledge and experience in the chosen field, sufficient capital to be able to produce reasonable income, and a bit of luck and perseverance as well.
There are a lot of reasons why new businesses fail at a very high rate, just as there are a lot of reasons why new traders fail at a very high rate. Trading for a living is not worthwhile as it requires a number of essential things like, formidable plan, a trading system that matches the amount of trading capital you have. This plan should include a minimum gain per successful trade. It should also include position sizing, i.e how much of your entire trading capital you will risk on any trade.
You need to decide whether your trading style will be long term strategically focused or more speculative. For a speculative approach, you need to prefer high risky products which are mostly short term price breakouts, reaping huge profits. If everything goes wrong, then the traders fail at a very high rate, even those who have succeeded can’t be guaranteed of massive financial benefit.