 What's going on, guys? Check out this sun right here. It's finally, finally a sunny day out here in New Jersey. And I wanted to hop here on the YouTube video today and talk about and discuss a topic. How much money do you need when you first start trading stocks? I talked about this actually a couple of months ago, but since then, my channel has grown a ton of new viewers, subscribers. So I figured, why not talk about it again? So let's hop inside of the house so the wind and the birds chirping and the trees don't mess up the audio. Let's go inside and talk about it. So the first thing I would actually recommend to people out there is to not focus on the actual dollar value that they're trading with. So if you're trading with $100, $500, excuse me, $1,000, don't just focus on that. What you should focus on is the percentage of profit that you're making on that money because that is what is scalable in terms of trading. So let me break this down to you a bit further, right? So let's say you start out with $1,000 and you're looking to trade in the stock market and you focus on 1% to 3% gains on your trades. At first, the profits aren't going to be marvelous in terms of a dollar value. $1,000, if you make 3%, that's 30 bucks. That's a respectable profit in terms of percentage, but $30, let's just be honest, it's not life changing money, right? But the thing that you're gaining here, the experience of making that 3% is what is extremely valuable here and what is extremely scalable because once you build these principles of being able to profit 1% to 3% consistently, you can then start trading with more money and then 1% on $10,000. Do the math guys, that is $100, right? And if you make 3% on $10,000, that is $300. So if you're consistently making maybe $300, 3% on $10,000 a day, that's $300 a day. And don't get me wrong, 3% every single day, that's not realistic, right? You're going to have days where you take a loss, where you're making less than 3%, maybe you only make 0.5%, right? But the whole idea here is if you're consistently in the green and you're making anywhere from, let's say, 3% to 5% per week on average, you know, that $10,000 can go a very long way. And the whole idea is to just build the principles of looking at percentage value. So starting out, what I would recommend honestly is just using a smaller amount of money and just building the discipline on making 1% to 3% or whatever percent that you feel comfortable making on that small amount of money so then you can transfer it to a larger amount of money. And the truth is guys, I usually recommend people to start out with a smaller amount of money and maybe even just a paper trading account which is trading with fake money, literally no real money at risk. This way they don't just blow out their entire account. This way they don't just lose a bunch of money and feel discouraged at first. So initially I would just recommend starting out with a money that your amount of money that you're willing to lose 100%. Let's say if that's $100, $500 for you, start out with that or a paper trading account. So this way you can focus on building the principles, understanding the stock market, trading, and just understanding the beast that is trading in the stock market. Guys, there's a bunch of things that go into it so you just need to understand and value that small amount of money before really pumping more money into your account and trading with a larger amount of money. So now let's get into a question that I've been actually getting a ton from you subscribers in the comment section, people in the Discord group chat, people on Facebook and Instagram regarding how much money I started trading with. The question goes, Stas, how much money did you start trading with? Well, I'm going to answer that right now and actually give a bit of a backstory regarding this whole situation. So something that I actually haven't mentioned on this channel and I don't even know why I've never mentioned this or how I've never mentioned this, but I actually had two corporate jobs in the past. And these two corporate jobs, they allowed me to save up money to fund my trading. This is actually what funded my account and what allowed me to start trading and doing this whole YouTube and other e-commerce businesses that I run online full time. This is what's helped me do this. So at first, like I talked about in the beginning of this video, I started out with a small dollar value and I focused on building my account up consistently and I focused on percentage growth because I knew at first with the small account value that I had, it wasn't going to be life changing money, but I knew if I was able to save up enough money, fund it into this account and consistently make the profit, I knew that I was going to be able to do this whole trading thing, everything that I'm doing right now full time and eventually that's what ended up happening. But at first, I practice what I preach. I say starting out with a small value, focus on percentage, that's literally what I ended up doing. So I ended up starting out my account. Literally, it was within $1,000 to $3,000. And I think it actually was $1,000 to start and then I slowly started to make profits on that account, which built up the value. And I was actually banking money in a high yield savings account at this particular time period that actually outgrew how much money I had in my brokerage accounts. So I knew if I continued to live frugally, continued to bank money into my savings account and continue to focus on just building my trading account by 1% to 3% per week, per trade, just positively growing and just developing those principles and trading, I knew that eventually, like I have right now, would be able to do this full time. And that's something that has just been a blessing to me, guys. I've just been frugal. I've been just investing a lot of my money. I literally don't get as much enjoyment in terms of spending money as I do investing it. Honestly, I don't really spend much money. I'm a minimalist, guys. I've wear the same clothes a lot. You guys can probably see through the videos and through the thumbnails how I literally wear a bunch of the same shirts. I'm not embarrassed to admit it, honestly, guys. It's just how I am. I see more value in investing money, trading money, and growing that money than just buying a piece of clothing like this, or the shorts that I'm wearing. I just see more value in investing money. And a lot of people out there, they may not be like that, which might hinder them in terms of saving the necessary money to trade full time, if that's their goal. But just having the principles and understanding investing and trading and how it can benefit you in life is super, super important. So the gist of it, guys, is I started out with two corporate jobs. I worked those back to back for a certain period of time. And then I was able to save money where I was able to fund my trading accounts, and I was slowly building up, slowly building up, saving money that's not at risk in a high yield savings account. And then I slowly started to funnel that money up. And from that 1000, 2000, 3000 account balance that I had in the beginning of my trading, I've obviously made a bunch of mistakes. I lost money, I wasted money, I lost money, wasted money. It was just a bunch of learning and a bunch of mistakes. But from that, you know, I was able to learn, I was able to grow. And here we are today, guys, so I was able to save that money. I was putting more money, funneling more money, funneling more money, making more profits. And here we are, guys, voila. So the gist of it is guys, I started out with $1000 saved up in the corporate job. And here we are. So let me know what you guys think about that in the comment section down below. Leave a like on this video if you did end up enjoying it and subscribe to the channel if you want to see more content from me. I'm uploading videos pretty much every day throughout the week and on the weekends doing market updates, trading updates, trading tips, stuff like that. And if you want to be further connected with our community, there are two links down below, the Strive Smart Facebook group and the Strive Smart Discord group chat. Both of those are free. Make sure to get in there. Very valuable information. Thank you all for watching. I hope you all have a great long weekend, a great Memorial Day. I'll catch you all in the next video. Peace out.