Mustang-

Doppler Bob, Your Work schedual will be a big advantage for you, because it removes the pressure of earning an income from trading to support your living expense--while at the same time it allows you to study the markets. Being undercapitalised and lack of experience is the reason why many new traders fail before they even have a chance to understand whats going on. That said, leave the mental (psychological variables) aspect of trading alone for now because you wont be able to truely appreciate it until you start to trade with real money. When real money is on the line thats when all the psychological variables if any will surface clearly. You mentioned that you are a patient person and that you want to do it right. Its possible that it will take several years before you are at point to take a trade with real money. Preserve your trading capital until your strategies(edge) performance proves to you beyond a reasonable doubt that you can make money. There is a much preperation and study to do prior to trading live. I would recommend that you focus all your time on studying the markets that you plan to trade. Form several strategies and paper trade them for a long time--you will most likely need work on this stage for some time and thats normal. You also need to folow your strategies for a long time to build screentime experience. Best strategies are Interval & Instrument independant strategies--Those will have the best chance of lasting rather then being a momentary phenomenon. For example if you plan on trading the ES, your strategy should also work on NQ and YM etc... After you have developed some solid startegies (that deal with all details from Entry to exit) and have been paper trading them profitably. Then you can focus on trading real money and only with 1 contract (if Trade capital is small, I recommend an instrument that has the lowest tick value possible to reduced losses that can occur as a result of newbe mistakes). Durring this period you need to be aware/understand your self and how you psychologically interact with real money trading. Its durring this phase that you will have to adjust/take care of psychological variable that may come up. In short...Getting a trading carrer launched has many steps. Psychology(how you interact with real money trading) is one of the many steps/phases. Take care of the preceeding steps i.e. understanding your trading instrument, Developing/knowing your strategy inside out, Ample screen time, will allow you to give your full attention to the way you interact with real trading when the time is right. There is more that I left out but I have a feeling other will take care of that. Good luck.