In truth,   I am not a trader and have not acted as one for at least 10 years.  A few option plays in energies but even that has been a few years.  My kids/grandkids know that I spend a lot of time looking at markets,  mostly funnys,  some technical and occasionally,  they ask questions that I am more than happy to answer.  I have yet to initiate a conversation.

The basic message that needs to be conveyed first and foremost is risk management. IOW, money management.  How much will you lose?   How much can you afford to lose?  Balance that with how much you can make.  Find rules and stick with the ones that work.  And the strangest thing in this business.  My rules may not work for you. You have to come up with your own.  

Hi Mark

 I dont have any children but if I did I doubt they would be willing to risk /lose as much $ as I have.

If they were I'd prolly beat them with a stick.

Seriously though,its a great learning experience to have skin in the game but boy oh boy you better have a handle on your emotions and self-discipline.

I dont consider myself "a successful trader" in so much as I make mega bucks.

There must be cookie cutter systems and algorithms out there that work for traders -until they dont-but Tim is so right about the rules are very verytrader specific when it comes to the "individual trader" as they may refer to us.

  John

Great question.

I would only teach them if they had expressed a strong interest in it.

However, I give tremendous weight to the weather in my trading, so understanding weather is a prerequisite. None of them were very interested in the weather.

I had several people practically beg me to teach them about trading in the 1990's, when I was making boat loads of money trading weather(using a satellite dish on my roof that gave me everything.........and an advantage before the internet existed).

One guy could never pull the trigger on any trades. He would talk all day about what he wanted to do and then how he should have done it. His analysis was pretty solid but he just didn't have enough risk taking mentality.

Another guy also was afraid to take risk, so he bought calls. Dumbest thing ever. They all expired worthless. You think that your risk is limited because you can't lose more money than the cost of the call but the chance of you losing all of it on the call is really high. Better to risk all your money on a futures trade that has much higher chances of going your way vs paying top dollar for something that probably won't happen. 

If you want to consistently make money trading options.........sell them. 

Another lady lost interest after I explained how I used weather.

A 4th guy was a gifted math genius that only traded the S and P and  I taught him nothing but we just exchanged information. 

He developed his own system, daytrading the S and P. 

He was making a killing but just trading 1 contract.  Even after he had grown his account to something like 10 times what he started with, he was trading just 1 contract.

I kept insisting that for him to really make some huge dough, he needed to increase the size of his trading and it appeared that he was getting ready to do that.

Then...........I never heard from him again.  He worked at the post office, which is where I would see him. He quit that job.

I feel that he became a full time trader.  This is what he was cut out for. He was mega disciplined and only took exact entry/exit signals that his system told him to use. 

I guess when your system is working, its easier to stick with it. 

Those 4 stick out the most at the moment. I often would tell people that without the weather element to my trading, I would probably not want to do this and since they are not meteorologists, that its probably not a good way to make money by using my methods.