The Most Valuable Resources I Have Found:

EDUCATION * * CHARTING SOFTWARE
RESOURCES & SUBSCRIPTIONS * * STOCK PICKS* *
BROKERS ** READING

EDUCATION

I am pruning this list all the time, since it is easy to overload on trading courses! There are only a few I really recommend:

#1 would have to be the Bonsai WaveRider: Surfing the Waves trading course. Yes I know it is a funky name, but the information is invaluable. I wish I had had this course when I first started trading. It may be the only one you need to be successful. Click for information.

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* Over 400 online ebooks to give you pointers
* Over 500 online trading seminars
* Over 1,000 hours of online trading material
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RESOURCES & SUBSCRIPTIONS

PHIL'S GANG: (TOP 5 PICK) Phil Grande is the "wall street maverick" who will tell you what "wall street" does NOT want you to know. He is quite a character, to put it mildly. Phil broadcasts his radio show on dozens of local stations nationwide and live on the Internet. Membership in his "Gang" is $39.95 a month with a 30 day money back guaranteee. Access includes the streaming video lessons twice a day and access to his radio show, plus ongoing stock picks and management of your active trades. He will teach you how to read simple charts (his "W" chart is all many people need to make a living trading... if you have enough capital to start with ...) and he is the best teacher of "how to short stocks" that I have yet seen.

Stock Gumshoe: A free site & blog that "tracks down" those "secret stocks" touted by a lot of the services below. This one you should definitely bookmark and check daily :-) This site, together with the Bonsai WaveRider course could make you some serious money.

CLEARSTATION: I had this listed at bottom of this page, but it needs to be brought to more prominence since, for brand new traders, this is a great (and free!) place to start. A ton of resources in here. Also see MystWerld, below.

Wall Street Teachers : David Elliott has his own methodology and while his seminars are VERY expensive (and I have never attended one) his FREE newsletter, and frequent free lessions, are worth signing up for. I read his FREE market update every morning as he has an uncanny ability to predict what the Dow and Naz will be doing today...
Also learn his "blue ice hole failure" pattern.
Here is a link to his newsletter article about that pattern: CLICK HERE

CHARTING SOFTWARE

TC2005   end-of-day charting software that lets you scan stocks & keep personal, historical notes on each stock. The $29.95 a month subscription is the way to go. I no longer recommend even trying their TCNet version as the live data feed is "iffy" and the numerous chat clubs are more distracting than helpful in the long run (based on my own past personal experience .. some may disagree).

MR. SWING: The best alternative to Worden I have found if you want to save some money on real time charting (half the price of Worden real-time) They offer intraday charts down to 1 minute and also support the OTC and BB stocks (which Worden does not). Their scans are not as extensive as Worden but are more targeted to the active short term swing trader and the more I learn about this charting software, the better I like it. The owner "Mr. Swing" is very accessible and committed to helping his traders be successful. Probably better for those with some charting experience.

Mr. Swing offers a 30 day FREE trial (I like it when they do that as it gives you time to evaluate without risk.) Click for information and some cool freebies.

NEW: for daytraders, live daily stream from Mr. Swing

QUOTE TRACKER (TOP 5 PICK): If you are not acquainted with this FREE real-time charting software (it uses your online broker for a free datafeed), I suggest you check it out: http://www.quotetracker.com/. There is a learning curve, but it is free, powerful and just keeps getting better :-)

STOCK PICK SERVICES (these are services that offer set-ups based on their criteria. Trades should play out within a few days to a week or two, max). I used to have a list of over 20 of these, but since most were NOT recommended, I have eliminated all but these two that I do recommend:

These subscription services will email you stock recommendations every 1-4 weeks. Just purchase their recs according to the "simple formula" & it will be hard for you to lose!

NOTE: If I had been taught this simple forumla my first day of trading, my account would probably be at least quadruple what it is today .. so I am telling you now :-))

To see the simple formula, CLICK HERE (new window will open)

What I suggest is use 1/2 your account principle to trade stocks recommended by the advisory services and the other half for stock pick recommendations, above. If the market is good, you can use the margin your broker gives you each day to experiment with your own day or very short term swing trades. Please try never to be on more than 1/2 margin overnight and then only if the market itself is resonably predictable (which is definitely is not as of April 2008).

READING:

My recommendation: start with the online ebooks (see Education, above). However if you also like books you can actually hold in your hand ... my recommendations are here.

Plan to re-read these books & ebooks several times over. The top traders re-read their favorite books often.

Remember, mastering the art of trading is a lot like learning a foreign language... if you want to speak & understand it fluently you will have to not just learn it, but absorb it.

RESOURCES - WEBSITES (also see USEFUL TRADER WEBSITES)

http://finance.yahoo.com

You can't beat FREE and Yahoo provides a bunch of information.... one of the first things newbies need to know is to ALWAYS check the next earnings date of any stock you are thinking of purchasing. Earnings page is: http://biz.yahoo.com/research/earncal/today.html

And it's a good idea to have this page up on your computer every day:
http://finance.yahoo.com/mp . You will need to refresh it every hour, but if there is news on a stock that might affect price, it will be posted here. (This is information they get from Briefing.com, however with the paid briefing subscription, you get more & faster...)

http://www.investopedia.com : this is an online dictionary of trading terms & definitions.

http://www.litwick.com: Best site I have found to learn candlestick patterns (if you want to purchase a book about candlesticks, I recommend Steve Bigalow, not Nison. Bigalow also sells a great set of candle flashcards to help learn the most important patterns.

http://bigcharts.com : if you don't have charting software, bigcharts lets you plot charts for free. But .. if you don't have decent charting software .. how do you expect to really learn how to trade? Ya gotta spend money to make it! I still used Big Charts a lot in the beginning as an auxiliary charting resource, just to see things in a different way.

below:
Stock Trading

Or check out their website:TradeStars.com FREE Stock trading site (the fact that their name is almost like mine is pure coincidence :-)

DIRECT ACCESS ONLINE BROKERS

New traders should be starting with small share sizes when trading. Those who charge $7 or more per trade will eat you alive with commissions, and also make you more hesitant to enter or exit a trade. Therefore in the beginning at least I recommend you use a broker that charges a penny per share ($1 min). That way you can enter/exit trades as you like, never trading more than 100 shares (which should be your max when starting out).

TRADE STATION: http://www.tradestation.com

I've tried 7 online brokers, including Ameritrade and Scottrade and several trading platforms including E-Signal. My #1 broker recommendation is still Trade Station.
They are honest, helpful & friendly. Executions are lightening fast & accurate.

You must use their proprietary analytical platform to trade. The good news is, this state of the art trading platform is absolutely awesome in what it can do, how it can analyze in dozens of different ways, stock movement for day & swing trading. Fully customizable as well (you can even write your own formula criteria for trade setups). A beginner can start with TS and still be using it long after he/she has become a highly successful professional trader.

If you make enough trades each month, their trading platform is free. One person I know makes sure he meets the minimum by buying 5000 shares of a penny stock, any one, then selling it almost immediately. Costs him about $10 instead of the $100 they would charge if minimum trades not met.

MB Trading: http://mbtrading.com

This is probably my top recommendation for new traders with smaller accounts, who just don't have the extra $99 per month for TS. Since in the beginning, you will be losing money .. the $99/month may be a major consideration for some.

MBT is also a penny per share with good executions & decent customer service. They offer many different order types: trailing stops & other strategy orders and also allow you to hold orders on your machine, making your stops "invisible" to the market. They are expanding services all the time, all at rock bottom prices. They also have the option to switch to $9.95 per trade flat rate when you "graduate" to trading over 1500 shares at a time. No analytical platform, they work with E-Signal (which costs the same as TradeStation but IMO is not as good .. although it definitely is sophisticated).
My recommendation is that when you are ready to afford an analytical trading platform, just switch to TS.

http://www.interactivebrokers.com. This one developed quite a negative reputation due to their total lack of customer service, which more resembled "customer abuse". However in recent months they have been trying to improve in this area & admittedly, for low fees, access to world markets including Canadian stocks, futures, forex, bonds etc ... they offer way more than the others - and cheaper, too.
Caveat: IB is only recommended for traders with at least 2 years experience. Their trading platform is not user-friendly & it is all too easy to make mistakes & find yourself the wrong way in a trade. Also do not use physical (visible) stops, especially if daytrading. For some reason, I have found that they tend to take out stops faster than does either TS or MBT, above.

However if you want to trade Canadian and/or world markets and trade options in the same account, IB offers the most versatility & definitely the best prices.

Think or Swim: I have not used this one, but have heard only positive comments from those who do use it.

BROKERS TO AVOID

Avoid those that are not direct access if you intend to trade professonally.
With a non direct access broker, you often are purchasing from their inventory, not the trading floor .. so if they don't want to fill you at your price, you don't get filled. Ask any potential broker if they offer direct access.

Remember as a new trader, you WILL be losing money, so I would strongly advise only going with the brokers who will let you trade for $1 per trade, minimun. At that rate commissions are never a problem.
NOTE: Not recommended:I recently used LowTrades.com to trade some Canadian stocks (before switching to IB). Definitely not recommended. No way to see real time quotes & although I was checking each day, they failed to show me that my stock was going down, down, down! The price they showed just stayed the same, day after day .. until I finally got suspicious and checked elsewhere. I closed that account .. fast!

A FRIENDLY WARNING TO SAVE YOU MONEY:

Like most new traders, I have spent a lot of money on trading seminars & one major mistake purchasing "decision-making" software for $2600, which proved worthless. I also threw away $500 on a tax accounting company (see TAX link).

And I'm lucky .. I've talked to traders who have spent thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars on seminars and fancy software. The dragons are everywhere looking for the new & inexperienced traders to devour....

My recommendation for you, to save you a bunch of money, is this: NEVER purchase expensive software that promises to "make decisions for you". If this stuff really worked, the inventors would be cleaning up in the market, not running around hawking their software.

The same goes for people who travel all over the country offering expensive seminars on how to beat the market. If they can do that, why aren't they trading? In fact, I finally figured out, the "real" gurus are trading everyday .. if they teach, they do it because they enjoy it, not as their primary source of income. (David Elliot and Phil Grande fall into this category). This also means they tend to charge easily affordable prices for what they do offer, as they know that quanity will trump price every time (i.e. charging $30 a month is affordable .. and if what you offer is good, you will have a million subscribers... better than running around the country trying to sell software for $3k a pop to a handful of people, most of whom will never recommend it...)

This is just logic, but I fell into the trap early on as well of wanting to find some "holy grail" that would lead quickly to trading success. There are no shortcuts! Experience, Patience, Perseverence!

Trading has RISKS. You must only trade with money you can afford to lose.