When I first started trading, I made every mistake in the book. I’ll admit it: I had no idea what I was doing. And my bank account was impacted severely because I didn’t do the proper research. When I started talking to friends—many of whom found investing success long before I did—I saw a pattern. It seemed like everyone made the same few mistakes. I guess that’s the price of being a rookie. That’s why I decided to gather these 3 mistakes, and how to avoid them. Trust me, you, and your financial security, will thank me later. 1) Not doing enough research. When I first started trading and investing, I figured it would be relatively easy. I mean, how hard could it really be? I bought into the myth that Wall Street was a bunch of hullabaloo. But the reality was much different: there was so much information, so many dissenting opinions, so many impassioned takes. How was I supposed to figure out which to trust? I felt as if I couldn’t catch a break. Whatever I read on CNBC would be directly contradicted over at Fox Business. What I realized was that I needed to find a way to balance all of these different takes. That’s where I found two things to be most helpful: Twitter and Score Priority. Twitter let me synthesize a bunch of articles, and Score Priority let me interact socially with other traders. That was huge in getting my information in order. 2) Trading with my money when I didn’t have to. This one might make you confused—how can one trade with someone else’s money. If I’d known about prop trading earlier, I would have saved myself a lot of grief. Prop trading lets you trade with a financial firm’s money in lieu of your own. You then split the profits with the institution. Through Score Priority, I discovered Try2BFunded. Try2BFunded was perfect for me because it was easy to engage with, it made signing up and getting paid extremely simple, and it offered me 60% of the profits. That’s serious money. Once I started using Try2BFunded, I was able to save up enough cash to steadily trade on the side. it took about 7 weeks for me to move through their qualified stages, but once I’d established myself I was astonished at the results. 3) Underestimating the impact of risk. You know that saying, go big or go home? Well, when it came to trading, going big too early meant I went home empty handed. The problem with stock trading is that it’s easy to underestimate just how risky things are, especially when you don’t know what’s happening early on. You see people making hundreds of thousands of dollars on one obscure stock, and it’s tempting to follow. And it’s just as easy to be too conservative, making portfolio growth all but impossible. Another reason I loved Try2BFunded was that it taught me how to manage risk. By working through the qualifying rounds, Try2BFunded makes sure you learn tactics that mean you’re only risking loss at affordable increments. Without Try2BFunded, I would have kept making the same risk-related mistakes. There you have it: 3 mistakes you don’t have to make. Go forth and prosper!