So, before you start searching for educational articles and reading books on investing and trading, it is important that you understand and know myself, what my strengths are, my preferences and the available time I can set aside for trading. or invest

I’ll start with my preferences and move from there to my strengths, then to the time I have available to me.

What would I like to be achieving? What kind of life do I want to have?

A couple of years ago, or maybe a little less, the concept of leading a life where I can generate my own income, without having to work for someone and wait month to month for my salary was almost inconceivable.

I used to tell myself, “I’ll just do well at my job and have a sure source of income deposited in my bank account at the end of each month”, but I also wanted to be financially free and be able to control my own time.

The more I educated myself about finance and investing, the more I saw how a job can be a huge life trap, and it can also be very risky.

Working 8am to 6pm (as I do now) means that each workday you are forced to spend 10 hours of your day working for someone else and frankly, I was not too keen on the idea of ​​busting my ass off. to make someone else rich.

True, I get paid for my service, but for 10 hours a day, I felt I deserved to be paid much more, and that I should be paid based on my efforts and not based on the number of hours I logged.

The risk of having a job comes from the fact that my ability to generate income is directly related to the fact that I am working for someone, which means that if one day I am laid off, my income generation stops at zero. and to be honest, the more I understand this notion, the scarier it seems to me to have a job.

So I better start learning how to generate my own income very fast.

Now, even though I still have a job, and I’m still working 8 am to 6 pm, my goal is to lead a life where I don’t work for anyone, earn based on my effort and not my time, and where I don’t No matter what the conditions are in the world, I can still have a flowing source of income.

One more preference I should add, I want to be able to have constant cash flow in my bank account, and I can only achieve this through trading, as value investing means freezing funds for months and years before translating these gains. in cash at the bank.

In this way, through trading, I can generate income, and through value investing, I can create wealth.

What are my strengths? What am I good at?

Coming from an engineering background, I spent 7 years of my life studying and applying mechanical engineering at university throughout my bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

Engineers are famous for being logic driven people and for being good analysts. I love looking at a chart or graph and trying to derive a sensible, logical explanation for why the chart looks the way it does and what it means.

But one thing I’m not a big fan of is complication, I like simple things, that’s why I was never very good in the fluid dynamics course, because there were too many complicated equations.

In order to solve any kind of problem, be it personal or work, I first try to simplify it, and I try to make it a 2D problem instead of a 3D one, I try to remove any kind of unnecessary noise around it, and leave only the essential factors. nudes.

Also because of my engineering background, I had to be comfortable with my math and I had to be good with numbers, which I am.

So let’s sum it up, I’m good at interpreting graphs, I have good analytical skills, I like to simplify the scenario I’m dealing with, and I’m comfortable with numbers.

Chart interpretation, analytical skills and the ability to keep things simple make me a good candidate for trading using technical analysis.

Analytical skills, the ability to keep things simple and comfortable with numbers make me a good candidate for interpreting financial statements and therefore value investing.

So here again, my skills allow me to be both a trader and an investor.

How much time am I willing to allocate to trade or invest?

Now I need to know if I can allocate enough time to trade or invest, or maybe both.

I live in the United Arab Emirates and we are in a GMT+4 zone, so the stock market opens at 5:30 pm or 6:30 pm depending on winter or summer time.

So either way, at 5:30 pm or 6:30 pm I can come home from work and be around most of the opening time. But every day before I trade I need to do my homework and scan the markets for trading opportunities, and this takes some time. So you would probably be trading the afternoon session of the market, since between 09:00 AM ET and 12:00 AM ET. a downtime in the markets, it is not worth trading, so the best time for me would be between 02:00 pm ET and the market close at 04:00 pm ET

Alright, now I know I have enough time to trade using technical analysis.

Now I am not looking to be an active day trader, I am looking more to be a swing trader, using hourly and daily time frames. So this means that I will have some free time that I can use to learn how to evaluate companies by interpreting their financial statements (i.e., value investing).

Also, I have my weekends that I can use to learn more about investing rather than trading, our UAE weekends are Friday and Saturday.

So I think that if I set a plan for my time and follow it consistently, I can manage to have enough time to learn both trading and investing, especially that I will be learning to trade at the same time that I am trading, since I signed up for the Trading Program. extended learning offered by Online Trading Academy, and I will be mentored throughout the trading session.

In short, my goal will be to further my education in both trading using technical analysis and value investing, as I believe I can do well at either, and I also believe that neither is better than the other. and they both work, and if applied correctly they can be a valuable source of income that in a few years will allow me to quit my job and lead an independent life without having to obey anyone’s orders, and after I quit my day job I will. I have all the time in the world for my operations and investments.