Good idea?

[great2c4me]

This economy seems to have everyone really struggling, including myself.
I've been contemplating making a decision that will provide for my young family and give me a realistic way into another great career.
I would like to hear how realistic it may be to really benefiting from the stock market - if it's, in fact, a learn-able trade.
So, what do I plan to do, since I've hit rock bottom financially?
I have my cdl and driving truck locally was a semi-provident living for my young family. However, there's little to no work now... my budget for living is down to the bare minimum, realistically, $1800/mo after food, health insurance, etc.
I can begin earning 40k-50k yr driving for one company or another. That would allow for a portion of $ to invest and plenty of down time to study and read about investing in the stock market. I tend to think that it would be worthwhile and it would allow me to make some great $ to invest in a great retirement plan of some sort.
I don't want to drive truck for the rest of my life, though it's partially enjoyable, I really want to be home with my kids and lovely wife. But... I've got to do something - and this brainstormed idea seems to be a realistic one. (Boy I wish I would've paid attention in school!)
So, how is this journey of learning the stock market trade? Is it something that I will be able to pick up on the side? Does my idea sound like a realistic one?
Thanks for your input

[rffrydr]

And don't get too burled up about it, truckdriver. They'll be days, days not unlike today, where you'll put your toe in only to get raped

Can't be macho here. I've operated heavy equipment in the past but I sure wouldn't wanna be pushing a big-rig up the hi-way today. Lives are at stake.

Now, buy yourself bank preferreds and big 5 debt (not a fund) and stick it in a maxed out IRA. Monday's after OPEX will be your first practical lesson
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Today is the Tomorrow you worried about Yesterday!

[nodoodahs]

+47% followed by -30% is only 1.4% annuallized.

Key point when I talk about a return target (whether it's 7% or 17%) is that it's a long-term target over multiple years. Think of it as a business: some years suck and some don't. Don't panic, though, because panicking sucks. Figure out why a year was bad and fix it if it's fixable, figure out why a year was good and do more of that if you can. A process of continuous improvement with an eye on the long term. After all, when you look back five or ten years from now, your total return over that five or ten years will mean more to you than the returns on any single day or week or month out of those five or ten years.

rffrydr is dead on about the sense of faith and fate and hope. I think back to "Enter the Dragon" and Bruce's demand of his student to show "real emotional content" - there's a bunch of real emotional content in trading and it's really an inside job, but not in the intellectual sense. The intellectual part is simple but the emotional part isn't easy. Even institutional asset allocators running the world's largest pension funds manage to screw up their potential returns by not just objectively following their plans, no, they get emotional and underperform their targets for the same reasons retail traders do.

Whether you start by batting for on-base-percentage for the first couple of years, or commence swinging for the fences, just remember, it's not only a long season, you're actually shooting for a successful long-term career in the league, so don't get discouraged (or too encouraged) by any one game or lucky (unlucky) streak, and don't take risks that'll prematurely end your career. rffrydr is right, you never do have to be a "speculator" you can reach your targets in pretty unspectacular mundane ways if you work at it consistently.
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I haven’t seen a beatin’ like that since somebody stuck a banana in my pants and turned a monkey loose.

[rffrydr]

Yeah....cept you're never gonna make 7% a year "playing" the market. If it works it'll be 47% one year minus 30% the next.

More likely you'll get drawn into a bigger position in something you ever thought possible--frustrated ever more how "the market" treats what you "know to be true." You used the word "provident": that sense of faith and fate and hope may not be the best mindset for trading. Divine punishment is just over the horizon.

Buy some bonds (some bank debt in this selldown would be a good start, Ally); some telephone div payers and start your trading with option credit spreads. Get Bill's 7%. In a couple years you can then start trading--or stop.
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Today is the Tomorrow you worried about Yesterday!

[nodoodahs]

Welcome to the forum!

These are my thoughts – worth absolutely nothing – and I am most certainly not giving advice of any kind, nor am I qualified to give any advice at all about anything.

I think the idea of working while saving and trading on the side is a realistic one, because it’s the idea I’m executing. I have a systematic approach that doesn’t take much time to actually trade, I work a regular job, save a large percentage of my salary, and I figure I’ll be retired to live off of trading my own account before I’m fifty if all goes well.

I took your budget and grossed it up for taxes and added a bit to make it more comfortable, and I come up with earning $32K annually pre-tax. Alone, given the salaries you specified you could earn, you should be able to save $8-$18K annually, and even more if the wife can help you out. If you (hypothetically, as a thought exercise) saved $13.5K each year and compounded at 7% annually through trading/investing then you’d have about $211K in ten years, which probably sounds pretty nice, doesn’t it? Ever thought of it that way, long-term? To me, there’s a lot of security in knowing that the future is at least partially funded by my own capital.

I don’t know, CAN you learn to trade on the side? Personally I think that almost anybody with reasonable above-average intelligence can learn to do it if they apply themselves, but it takes a certain emotional outlook to be good at executing what you’ve learned on a consistent basis. Given that most people are average or below-average intelligence, don’t apply themselves, and don’t have a solid emotional outlook suited to trading, the odds might not be good for you.

Maybe the answer is you park some money in some diversified funds and set aside some play money to learn something about the markets and hope to compound more quickly than these funds do, and switch to managing it all yourself at some point in the future.

Or maybe just throwing the money into a mix of truly diversified funds would be a better solution. I don’t know, you have to figure that out for yourself. Maybe your time is better spent learning Portuguese through cassette tapes while driving?

There ARE some funds I personally respect, but they may not be right for you, certainly this isn’t advice of any kind, but I have looked at MDLOX http://finance.yahoo.com/q?d=t&s=MDLOX and the Arrow funds http://arrowfunds.com/files/DDF/BAL-Q210.pdf and the GTAA ETF http://www.mebanefaber.com/2010/09/29/cambria-global-tactical-etf-nysegtaa/ as places I might park some money if I weren’t a “do it myself” kind of guy. That's certainly not an endorsement and not advice and not a recommendation, these are just funds that I've looked at where I respect their approaches to the market and in two of those instances, I've had some electronic conversations with some of the managers. I do think that reading everything you can about these funds’ approaches to the market would be a good starting point in learning about investing/trading, though, even if the funds themselves aren’t right for you.

I don’t think anybody like us – retail traders, workaday slobs – will ever get “rich” quickly in the markets. I do think that it’s possible to save and invest and get reasonably wealthy over a period of years, however, to the point where things that were once thought impossible, become practical, in just a decade or so of consistent work.

But that’s just my own unfounded opinion.
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I haven’t seen a beatin’ like that since somebody stuck a banana in my pants and turned a monkey loose.