$10-15k starting capital is more than enough provided you are willing to commit to time and learning. The issue with smaller (ie: less than $10k) starting balances imo, is the rate of return, risk/reward and time to see the real effects of compounding.
Well done on thinking ahead whilst you are starting out and having the foresight to not get into bad habits.
With $10k you could take either 10x $1k positions, 2x $5k or perhaps 1x $10k .. From a learning and risk management point of view, lots of small trades is the best way to learn in my opinion. The brokerage can be a killer and frustrating. It might be worthwhile having a spreadsheet with shows potential return exclusive of brokerage. This could demonstrate how you ultimately might perform once you increase position sizes, increase confidence with less risk of loosing a big chunk of your starting capital.
The advantages of taking 10x $1x positions is on several fronts:
Less risk of blowing up everything. Even if half your positions go to $0, you still have half your money left.
More tickers and experience. Personally I think it helps to have multiple kettles on the boil, for me it makes me less likely to make silly shortsighted decisions because of getting bored and wanting to overtrade. 10x positions, for a few weeks each means multiple trades a week.. plenty to keep the itchy trade finger busy.
Opportunity to try more things, diversity across all sorts of trades/techniques. Even a longer-term hold you might want to try wont hold up all your capital.
Downsides are that you will likely not see a doubling of your balance in a few months and you wont get the leverage in a multi-bagger if you manage to get set in one.
In terms of good habits:
Don't follow any poster on HotCopper, Twitter or elsewhere. If they are saying buy, it means they already hold you are behind the game already.
Stick it out. Few jump in and start making money straight aware. Loads of posters appear on HC, ask for help, post enthusiastically and then disappear quickly.
I don't think you need to have a plan from the outset, this will evolve and be different, its developing of a plan that is important, refining what works, what doesn't. Doing more of the former and less of the later.
tldr; check out the 5 grander thread in conjunction with the STT Weekly threads. Show real trades on a $5k starting balance, all with different approaches.
Some of these post the result of their day trading which is much harder to emulate and perhaps not as useful for a Short Term strategy. Others are posting trades that are predominately multi-day or weekly and you can see the result of the different techniques.
