 everyone and welcome. This is Melissa Arma with the Stock Swoosh, and today I wanted to talk to you, those of you out there who have small trading accounts. I get this question a lot. People think that they cannot train if they have a small account. What do I mean by small? Well, with an options account, the minimum that you need required to open an options account is $2,000. So that would be the smallest cash account that you could open. In reference to a day trading account, it depends if you open up a retail account or a prop account. But let's say you go with prop, the smallest that you can open is normally around $2,500 at a proprietary day trading firm. You can Google that if you want to find out what a prop firm is. But either way, I get this question a lot as far as what do you do if you're a beginner? If you're a beginner trader and you have a small account, your goal should be to build the account while you learn. So I call it chunking it out. You can absolutely take a small account, like for example, say you take a $2,500 starter proprietary day trading account, you could build that up from $2,500 to $5,000. And then you start risking more portrayed at $5,000 and you build the $5,000 up to $10,000. And then when you're at the $10,000 level, again, you take more risk and you can build the $10,000 into a $20,000 account. That is what I would suggest to people who are new and have a small account size, the same thing with options. But either way, you have to start with the money that you have. For a lot of people that are working and saving, I would say to people you have to look at it as a process. The idea of waiting until you have $100,000 in a cash account to trade is probably unrealistic if you have right now today $2,000 and it's taken you a year to save that money. You understand what I'm saying? When are you going to save $100,000 if you're not trading, if you're not working another job, if you don't have investments in the market or secondary source of income 25 years from now? So I mean, you can't put your money or invest it in a CV with certificate of deposit or deposit account and take the $2,000 and earn anything on that. When interest rates are 0.001% in its savings right now, you can make your money work for you, but you have to look at it realistically. And again, the idea is to be careful. What I mean, you use stops, which I teach people to do in the Golden Gap course, and you have to assess your risk. Your risk should be based on the size of your account per the cash size. So say you have start, for example, an account with $2,000 and you want to trade options, you should be risking $100 a trade, then $150 a trade, then $200 a trade and so on and so forth. And that's how you build it up. You also have to have more winners than losers. When you have more losers and winners, you're going to lose money and you're going to you're going to lose no matter how much money you have. It doesn't matter if you have a small account, a beginner account or an advanced trader account. You always have to have more winners and losers. That's the key in being a successful trader. So for those of you out there that are wanting to trade that have a beginner size account for the cash side, there are options out there for you. It is very important to know what to do. It is very important to look at and assess your risk accordingly, but stay positive because you can take a small account and build it up to a large account over time. You got to leave the money in the other profits that you make so we can build up. And that's how you get to the point where you can get somewhere with it. Waiting until you've saved an exorbitant amount of money to train is not realistic in my opinion unless you have money coming in from other sources, which most people do not. So if you're thinking about trading and want to learn my method, whether it's doing day trades or options, it's called the Golden Gap System. I teach it in a class once a month. Email me at melissa at thestockswitch.com for more information.