That's right, I don't advise anyone to invest more than what you're comfortable losing: besides making dumb decisions even such things as an innocuous gap in your test coverage can lead to losing everything you have in a zap. In my opinion there's also no need for margin account right away. Focus on paper trading and only invest a few hundred bucks in real account just to get the feeling of it and to realize what are the little things that paper trading misses.