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Trading Education -  Online Commodity and Futures Trading, A Forex Trading System and Education for the Forex Trader, Commodities Trader, Options and Stock Trader.

Step 1: The Business Plan

Business Name: Give your trading business a name. Why? Because trading is a business, and so is owning an investment property, running a company, even your own home, and all businesses have income and expenses. Trading comes with income (hopefully) and expenses (always) and thus must be treated like a business. So give it a name.

Date: Date it from the date you prepare it and give it a time period such as three months or a year, so that you can renew it and maybe make possible changes.

Address, Phone number, Contact details: Once again, you need to treat this like a business, so write it out as if you are going to submit it to someone important.

Business Mission: What is your mission. An example would be, 'To create my own trading system that is not only easy to follow, but is teachable'. This may be something you feel is important because if you can't teach someone something, it is probably too complex. Another example could be, 'To design a system that can be used on all liquid markets', or 'Design an intraday trading system to trade the S&P500'.

Business Goals: These are a more descriptive version of your mission. Such as, 'Increase my trading capital or account to $xxxx', 'To be averaging $xxx a month from my trading system consistently', 'To be able to trade with only an hour a day exposure to the markets', and so on. Don't be scared to write down what you really want. Too many people lower their goals and dreams in life because they don't happen quickly enough, which is all too common a theme in today's society. If you have trouble believing in your self, start with smaller goals and increase them, but don't go the other way. If your original goals appear large, you have to give it more time to eventuate. Rome wasn't built in a day!

Tools and Resources: List all your trading tools. These will include all hardware and software. For example list the computer, how many monitors, what sort of internet connection, what charting software, who are your brokers etc.

Risk Management: Even though you will answer this in more depth in step 3, it is important to be clear what you are willing to risk in this business venture. What is the amount of capital you're prepared to invest. If you're new to trading, be prepared to take a lot of losses early on so it is important you are clear on what you can afford. Paper trading is certainly the best way to go when starting out though. You might want to add here where extra investment money will come from should you want to invest any more into your business.

Financial Records: Keeping records is probably more overlooked than risk management but it is vitally important. You need records for all income and expenses of the business, and also all activity such as trades themselves. It is impossible to assess how your business is travelling if you don't keep records of everything the business does. Write a list of what you will use to keep records, such as accounting software for income and expenses and maybe excel or power point for your actual trades.

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