For my own personal experience trading for more than seven years now, i recommend new traders to start with a minimum of four to five thousand dollars. Anything less than two thousand is too little. I highly encourage new traders to treat your initial capital as market tuition. Don't focus on making money instead focus on spending that money to learn.

You are focused on education first, so you can use your knowledge. You learned to make money from that education in two to four years, not right away. You should treat that four thousand dollars as market tuition and expect that you probably spend at least fifty percent of it slowly during the course of this market education. That's the amount you spend on covering commissions, live market data, subscriptions short locate fees and making small mistakes trading here and there.