Agree with the mentoring part. Linda Rashke was my mentor.
www.lbrgroup.com. Think its like $100 per month to get the transcripts to the trading room ($375 per month for full membership and live trading room access). There is a ton of content there for $100 if you are learning. I spent a year in that trading room and learned a ton. But first read her book 'Street Smarts'... then join the room and print off the transcripts and read them and review the charts they post on 'Daily Educational'.
my second favorite book is 'Markets In Profile' by Dalton. Great book on understanding 'value' versus 'price'. he also has a useful newsletter that you can sign up to receive at
www.marketsinprofile.com
John Carters 'Mastering The Trade' is o.k. this could be a useful purchase for newer traders as it has a lot of good overview material.
--------
I remember my first year. I overtraded my account big-time. All my good trades were wiped out by my overtrading. many days, I would be up big and then fritter most of it away. then I would lose money on another day and slowly bleed my account down.
so my top advice would be this: don't overtrade your account. you need to build a collection of profitable set-ups. this takes time. these set-ups need to fit your personality/style or else you won't truly believe in them and give up on them. each set-up might only occur a few times per week on average. or one might occur 3 times in one day and then not for 3 days. so you have to build up a library of set-ups and trade a few different contracts as sometimes 1 just sucks for a while. personally, I favor YM and NQ. The both are cheap per tick and have all the liquidity you will ever need.
Linda Rashke makes a small number of points each day but she makes money almost every day and will use big size when a clean set-up arrives.
The beauty of futures is you really just need to make a small number of points to make a living. Overtrading will chop you up. Disciplined trading with high % set-ups and bigger size is the way to go as far as I am concerned. It is so nice to wait for your set-up, catch a few points --- and have your day made.