Beginners

How to Plan Your Start in Trading This Year: Step by Step

Astron Team · 09/24/2026 · 4 min read

At the start of a new cycle, it's common to see lists of "assets to watch this year" or market forecasts. They have their value, but they solve little if a person hasn't yet organized the basics: how they will study, how much they will risk, and what they will consider success. This guide focuses exactly on that planning, before any bet on market direction.

Step 1: choose a market before choosing an asset

Stocks, forex, cryptocurrencies, and commodities have different dynamics in terms of hours, volatility, and the factors that move price. Trying to follow all four markets at once, right from the start, tends to dilute attention and make it harder to build any real body of analytical knowledge. Choosing a main market for the first few months — and going deep on it — tends to yield more understanding than scratching the surface of several at once.

Step 2: set aside a study phase on a demo account

Before any real deposit, a demo account phase allows you to test how a certain type of analysis behaves over time, without the emotional weight of risking real money. The goal of this phase isn't to "win" on the demo, but to observe how often the read made before a trade actually gets confirmed afterward, and adjust the method based on that.

Step 3: define risk rules before defining strategy

A common practice among more experienced traders is to first define how much total capital they are willing to allocate to trading, then the maximum share risked per trade — a value between 1% and 2% of the balance tends to be a conservative starting point — and only then choose which entry strategy to use. Doing this process in reverse order, choosing the strategy and only then thinking about risk, is one of the most common mistakes beginners make.

A planning example with numbers

Suppose an initial capital of R$ 3,000 set aside for trading, with a rule of risking at most 1.5% per trade, equivalent to R$ 45. If the goal for the first quarter is to make an average of 20 trades per month following this rule, the planning already makes clear, before any trade, what the worst-case scenario of a bad streak looks like: ten losses in a row, for example, would represent a reduction of approximately R$ 450 in capital, about 15% of the total — a number that helps gauge whether the chosen strategy is compatible with that person's loss tolerance.

Step 4: build a simple, sustainable study routine

You don't need to spend the whole day in front of charts to improve. A realistic routine can include 20 to 30 minutes a day reviewing the chosen market, plus a fixed time each week to review closed trades, comparing what was planned with what actually happened. Keeping a simple log — date, asset, reason for entry, result — builds, over a few months, a personal database of what's working and what isn't.

Step 5: review the plan at set milestones, not after every trade

Changing strategy after two or three bad trades is a common pattern that gets in the way of the learning curve, because no strategy — even a good one — wins 100% of the time. Setting review milestones, such as the end of each month or every fifty trades, gives enough time to evaluate the method with a larger sample before deciding whether it should be adjusted or replaced.

Tools that help at this stage

A platform like Astron offers a demo account and charts with the main indicators already configurable, which makes it easier to test study hypotheses at no cost before any decision involving real capital. The important thing is to use these tools within the planning described above, and not jump straight into real trades just because the platform is available.

Practical conclusion

Starting well doesn't depend on nailing the perfect strategy right away, but on building a structure — chosen market, testing phase, defined risk rule, sustainable routine, and review milestones — that allows you to learn from your own mistakes in an organized way. Trading involves real risk of capital loss at any stage, and this planning exists precisely so that risk is known and managed, not ignored.