Reddit mentions of Buy High Sell Low: Lessons and Warnings for Beginning Traders

OK, so let's just ignore the $2500 that you are going to ignore as well.

With $1000 to play with, you can't do much. You'll be limited (likely) to either Forex or Equities. (Futures are out because you don'd have a big enough account to trade any of the futures markets worth trading.)

You will be tempted to play with Forex, but that is a fools game. The reason is because the counter-party to your trade is also your Forex broker. (The Forex market is not regulated and has no central clearing.)

So you're gonna have to trade stocks. First, find a broker who will let you open an account with $1000. Make sure you know what kind of commission you will be pay on every trade, because that has to come out of your 1000.

Next, limit yourself to high-volume, low-price stocks. I like to use the Google Stock Screener to screen for stocks. I would recommend that you trade nothing with a market cap less than $500M, a price between $10-$25 and an average daily volume over 1M shares. When I apply that screen to Google, I get almost 200 possible stocks to trade.

Next, start reading online to learn trading strategies. Don't pay for anything more expensive than a book. Trader training is a joke. (I speak as someone who has both taken the training, traded for almost 6 years now, and written a book on the subject of learning to trade. You can learn a ton online without paying for it.

You can either go hard-core and open a trading account where you execute your own trades via your own trading platform, (software loaded onto your computer), or you can just place orders with a broker. One way or another, though, you are going to have to decide WHAT to trade, WHEN to trade it, HOW MUCH to trade, and WHEN you will know that you are wrong.

Briefly, any valid trading strategy is very much like a valid scientific thesis: it has to be both testable and falsifiable. (I spend a whole chapter in my book talking about this, but briefly, before you open a trade, you need to know 3 things:

1. What is your Profit Target?
   
2. What is your stop-loss trigger?
   
3. When will you close the trade if you haven't hit either of these?
   
   The key to successful trading is (1) having a valid trading strategy which YOU PERSONALLY BELIEVE IN and (2) sound money management techniques.
   
   If you can invest 10-20 hours a week studying, you should be ready to open an account and start paper trading in a couple of months.
   
   Oh, one other thing I forgot to mention. U.S. citizens are limited to making no more than 3 equity trades in a week if they have less than $25,000 in their trading account. Keep that in mind if it applies to you.