the is that is good to have a mentor in anything that has to cryptocurrency both trading and investment, and that mentor should be someone you know and can access at any point in time, so I believe that we have to understand that investment is quite different from trading because you may not bother to learn and master ways of buying and selling of cryptocurrency kind of investment and you may have or experience a profit, but in trading you have to acquire the knowledge before you can excel in trading, and trading need for you to have a mentor that's well known.
When I was still pursuing a career in trading, even mentors will send a disclaimer that they are only giving you information with no guarantee that the information will work, and that the bulk of the job is in you finding what works for you. Some that are honest will tell you that until you personalise the information they are sharing, then you cannot make good use of them. This then mean that mentorship is good for many things but for trading, even your mentor will be struggling to make profits but will use paper trading for examples and will never want to trade live market with you because he understands its a different thing all together.
Like I said before, demo trading is easy and everyone is usually a champion is demo which is in hindsight but when it comes to trading live market, even the mentors will hide for the sake of their reputation because Bitcoin will always mess them up when they try to predict the price movement with certainty.
I have tried many things when it concern trading including using different mentors. When the chips are down, you will realise it is only you and the market.
Trading is just too subjective and this is the reason it is difficult to scale through and the reason I choose another route which in buying and holding for long term.
I agree with everything in your post Odohu, which largely it is difficult to find your right balance when it comes to trading, and so whether you end up trading and/or investing, you need to figure out your right balance, so in that regard, I believe that using your actual money is better than demo trading.. so any of us should be able to figure out some kind of balance in terms of how much we trade or how much we invest in which we are not nervous about whether we win or lose, so in that regard, if you are nervous about it, then you are likely trading/investing too much.
You have given a good summary to this discussion which comes back to personalizing the knowledge and information to be able to work out a system that works for the individual, this being married to our financial status, risk appetite and targets.
In other words, I would suggest to practice with real money rather than fake money, even if your budget might start with just $100.. and so there is likely some need to have real money at stake in order to really learn, but you do not need to use a lot of money to learn, but it should be an amount that you are willing to learn, whether you consider yourself to be merely practicing or investing for the long term with real desires to make money and/or to increase your future options in life.
I will try trading again sometime in the future when I would have established the kind of portfolio I want in Bitcoin. The suspension is just to avoid any distraction and to enable me properly manage my finances. I know that it could be a wonderful opportunity to make good morning within a reduced interval of time but I have seen that it is not easy to become a consistent and profitable trader, the reason I am taking my time too.
Furthermore, I have noticed that trading is more of a psychological game which will become problematic if there is any form of desperation to make profits. In other words, as soon as one is fixed on making money quickly, then the fear of losing will creep in and this will do more damage than good. I don't want to trade with funds I'm afraid of losing, so I'm working out a method to enable me achieve this.