Am I an investor or a trader?

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

I’ll start with my preferences and go 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 having a life where I can generate my own income, without having to work for someone and wait month after 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 able to control my own time.

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

Working from 8 am to 6 pm (as I do now) means that every work day you are forced to spend 10 hours of your day working for someone else, and frankly, I didn’t really like the idea of ​​breaking my ass. to make someone else rich.

It’s 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 fired, my income generation stops at zero. And to be honest, the more I understand this notion, the scarier it seems to have a job.

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

Now, even though I still have a job, and still work from 8am to 6pm, 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 have to add, I want to be able to have a steady flow of cash 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 logical, sensible 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 type of problem, be it personal or work, first I try to simplify it, and I try to make it a 2D problem instead of a 3D one, I try to eliminate any type of unnecessary noise around it, and leave only the essential factors naked.

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 being 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 back from work and be present 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 in the afternoon session of the market as between 09:00am ET and 12:00am ET. a down time in the markets, 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’m not looking to be an active day trader, I’m more looking 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 take advantage of to learn more about investing instead of trading, our weekends in the UAE 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 learn to trade at the same time that I am trading, since I signed up for the Trading Program. extended learning offered by the 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 both work, and if applied correctly can be a valuable source of income that in a few years will allow me to leave my job and lead an independent life without having to obey anyone’s orders, and after I leave my day job I will. I have all the time in the world for my operations and investments.