Want to earn money while traveling the world? Trading stocks online is one of the easiest ways to start making a dent in your investment portfolio. All you need to do if you want to start trading stocks online is fill out an application form and create a brokerage account that you can fill with money to spend on stocks and shares. Often, when people start trading online for the first time, they prefer to use a stock broker to help them manage and track their investments. This can be helpful for you too, but you may prefer to examine the marketplace yourself. If you decide to go it alone, it's important to make sure that you have a good understanding of the market, and a strategy for success. If you're wondering whether you're ready to begin trading online, here's what you need to think about first. 

Trading Online is Easy, making a Profit is Hard
While trading stocks online is simple enough for anyone to do, that doesn't mean that anyone can start making a profit within a matter of hours, or even days. A low barrier to entry means that many people are getting into stock trading today, but the vast majority of these people will end up losing their money or ending up with less capital than they had to begin with. The trouble is, there's a big difference between opening a brokerage account and being prepared to successfully trade stocks online. The good news is that just because earning a substantial profit is harder than it seems with online trading, doesn't mean that it's impossible. 

All you need to do is make sure that you have the following things before you get started:
• A written list of the goals you want to achieve as a stock trader
• A profitable and well-researched system for trading stocks 
• An insight into the risk and money management rules of trading
• A trading plan (Preferably in writing). 

Preparing to Trade Stocks Online 
Ultimately, your goals will be personal to you, and you can learn about the rules of risk and money management from a professional broker. The question for most people starting to trade stocks online isn't how to write down their goals, or even create a trading plan, but how do they figure out whether the stock trading system they've chosen is going to be profitable for them in the long-term. 

Figuring out whether your trading strategy is profitable means basing them on policies that have been proven to work in the past. The more you learn about stock market behavior and the history of stock trading as it has evolved over the years, the more you'll begin to discover about valid trading strategies and how they can support your trading goals. 

Ideally, you'll want to talk to a broker about your strategy before you put it down on paper. However, when you're confident that you've got the right strategies in mind, writing it down, alongside your goals for trading helps you to stay focused and on track when you enter the fast-paced world of the stock market. Getting everything planned out, in the beginning, will reduce your risk of spontaneous judgement calls and emotional errors. And, having a good living? Well, it allows you to travel more - and explore the world on your terms.