If you could do it again what would you change?

I would spend my time studying price action, price patterns, and the volume profile.

I would trade micro forex at .01 or .10 a pip to get the feel of things while putting real money at risk. 

I would trade larger time frames. Look at weekly, daily, 4hr, 5min. Get the whole picture. 

Instead of focusing on how much money I could make, I should've looked at how much I could lose.

Understand risk and how to manage it. Study crowd psychology.

I started off, like many other kids, thinking penny stocks would be my ticket. Made some big money, but also lost it all!

Then we had the big tech rally of 2000, instead of just buying a bunch of big name stocks and riding out the rally, I kept trying to daytrade the hell out of them. I would have been way better off just buying and holding if I just paid attention to the bigger trend.

I did exit the rally around Nasdaq 3000 thinking it was overdone, there were another 2000 points of upside which I missed, but then it crashed hard, so I was ok with that decision.

I also should have focused on option trading much sooner for the purpose of hedging and covered calls. I was afraid of getting into options because I always heard they were too risky. The truth is that option trading can be the safest thing you can do for your portfolio if done right.

1. Pay more attention to P/E (really Enterprise Value/Earning) in the early days when I lost a lot.

2. Don't think you're smarter than the market.  Know you're dumb, cause with limited information we all are.

3. Understand investing is like farming.  You make your bets (plant seeds) when the stock/market is down and harvest your profits (crop) when the market is up.  

oh god, 2008. Its like my 2-3rd year in the markets as a young investor and i'm finally learning the ropes in the venture game(picking my own stocks, relying on my own dd). Anyhow i played the downside and bottom about as well as one possibly could who was invested in junior miners and exploration stocks. Got a little luck buying a company called high desert gold on the way down as it traded well below cash value, the luck being when they cashed everyone out with a substancial issuer bid giving me an actual gain in december 2008 on my biggest holding. Anyhow i get some cash from this at just the opportune time and deploy the capital perfectly in a handful of just destroyed junior resource companies trading well under cash. I set myself up about as well as i could of with my limited chips. Now here's the disaster, every stock i purchased(caz,tbe,sac, ect) gave me a quick 50-200-even 300%, so me trying not to be greedy cashed out of every one not knowing they were going to go up another 1000%+ in the next while without looking back. Damn, you guys have no idea the amount of money i left on the table and like i said i aint worth much so these plays would of been huge for me. Caz in toronto, had something like 150k shares bought at .03 and sold at .08-.10, it went to a buck about a year later. had i simply just used the sell cost-keep freebies stategy i'd be worth 10x what i am currently.

but i guess i shouldn't complain in the end, still worth more then what i started with and that more than most can say since 2006. licking my chops at a similar but not so hardcore opportunity right now, got to learn when to sell though

also, my first year maybe i should have read balance sheets HA