Itās complicated as the guy below explained in much more detail than I could at this point in my learning well that and Iām not the best at explaining my thinking but here goes nothing - the reason for the weighting is also complicated and Iāll explain in my response to the other person - to answer your question about time spent; youāre assessment is actually pretty close but not far enough, this past year my average day is 13 hours in the market with about 2-3 hours research done out of hours, Ive never got much sleep but it has some advantages when it comes to study 
- you can stop reading here if you donāt want a break down -
But yeah starting off i had previous knowledge of business, economics and a bunch of other things Iāve found useful but no actual experience in the markets so knowing I was statistically likely to loose I figured Iād have to learn as much as possible while putting it into practise with as minimal risk as possible so paper trade, had some success and had learnt a lot (I thought anyway)- Iād also wake up two hours before the European Market and research a further variety of information about investing, finance, economics, trading, various companies etc I keep up to date with international/business news as much as it pains me and set up various streams of information through alerts etc to streamline the whole process, my notifications go off constantly now but I know about things as soon as they happen if not earlier. Aside from that Iād find people worth listening to at the very least on various platforms the obvious ones being buffet, lynch, burry, woods thereās other lesser known people - Iāll recommend one here - Patrick Boyle on finance - hedge fund manager does videos explaining how the market functions, lectures at some business school in London etc, pretty informative.
Then once Iād put actual money in come open Iād mainly trade companies I was already familiar with, I wasnāt so much setting out to make money as much as I was to learn how the market functioned while I built my capital so once I was more comfortable I could make larger moves & I did take losses at first which made me more cautious as I went on so each time Iād add a company Iād look through all the finances/who was funding them from year to year etc & what they did or were planning to do to a deeper degree, what had happened in their past, various other bits and pieces, then look at the historical graphs whoās involved in the company, which institutions are buying shares, whoās short etc level 2 data - Iād see what the trends were and how they affected different sectors, then try to gauge sentiment by checking frequency of searches, if there was any news or rumours and what the general chatter was, Iād generally then check individuals track records while doing this as thereās a lot of noise, the individual who posted that extensive analysis below strikes me as the type of person whoās information is worth taking into account - even if you donāt use it, itās worth knowing essentially
It does take up a lot of time and concentration as such after 8 months Iām finally starting to feel very burnt out with it- but I donāt have to do it as much as I did while setting this up and I donāt add as many stocks anymore and those I do Iāve already done the research on/have traded before - so long as the story hasnāt changed too much I might take profits one month and rebuy the next if Iām just looking for a place to keep some money till a different opportunity shows its self such as a general pull back in one area or whatever the market decides to throw my way - itās thrown my allocation way off as certain picks are up thousands of percentage points but are now essentially serious starter positions at the current price whereas before they were very early picks in my portfolio that were about 0.3-4% of my allocation before they jumped a ridiculous amount, gme being one of the more famous examples only made Ā£500 but I only put about Ā£20 in so it has its moments even if it can also be frustrating due to not being heavily weighted towards that one particular stock - then once the research is done I only have to make sure disaster doesnāt strike so it requires a lot less analysis each time Iām checking in on that particular companies performance - the downside being I can miss information sometimes that someone who only focused on a couple of stocks wouldnāt so I try to make sure most stocks have some relation to each other in terms of infrastructure -
Sorry for typing too much I could honestly go on and on but yeah tldr, I sorta had too much time this past year.
& in regards to the emotional aspect it does feel like a balancing act in the eye of the storm where you have to pivot on individual stocks from time to time.
