Level Up

Being a trader, you are constantly assessing and working on yourself in order to progress and make the best trading decisions possible.

As I have mentioned in my blog time and time again — Just because you come up with a profitable method, it does not mean you will automatically have the patience/discipline to trade that method exactly as planned.

Recently I have been trading AUD/USD as per my usual ‘bread & butter’ method, but I have also been trading a new additional different style method on other pairs.

On paper this method seemed phenomenal – but on paper was not real time trading and on paper did not have any real trading emotions attached to it. As my father has told me a billion times throughout my life, ‘The greatest plans of mice and men often go astray. Don’t get excited until that money is actually in your hot little hands’.

The big question was, ‘Do I,  actually have the patience/discipline/confidence inside of me to trade this thing in real time?’. I mean we were talking a whole different level of patience/discipline/risk to what I was normally use to trading the aussie.

The first few trades were insanely difficult because it seemed like everyone else was going the opposite way — I am not even kidding… it felt like everyone. But I sucked it up and just traded my little method… and boy did it pay off. The ‘everyone’ that I was so worried about going against, ended up being wrong.

Anyone that has been reading my blog for a while knows that ‘influence’ is my biggest trading issue and there was one slip up due to that***. I realised what I had done about 30 seconds flat into opening that position and I closed it straight away.

(***It’s important when it comes to risk management to account for silly little trades like that).

Once upon a time I would beat myself up really badly emotionally over silly little mistakes like that (my second biggest trading issue — emotional self sabotage), but I am trying to not be so hard on myself these days. Sometimes you have to be nice to yourself and focus/congratulate yourself on what you have accomplished.

Here is a pretty cool trade that I recently pulled off:

USD/CAD long opened a bit before Bernanke and closed Monday night.

Hypothetically and being very basic (without going into R/R, etc.), lets say a method generates 200 trade signals a year. 75 of those signals may result in perfectly normal losing trades and you may make 20 silly mistakes. What I, and every other trader for that matter is aiming to do, is let those winners run to their full potential, eliminate any negativity/fear associated with those 75 perfectly normal losing trades and work on myself to dramatically reduce or completely eliminate those 20 silly mistakes.

At the end of the day being impatient, greedy, fearful, undisciplined and too emotionally involved in your trades is a choice. Therefore, you can make the choice to put your ego to the side, be honest with yourself, identify your bad trading habits, and come up with a plan to improve.

Here’s a great quote out of a NLP book that I have been recently reading:

‘If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got. If what you are doing is not working, do something else’.

And here’s another from an unknown author:

‘Feelings are much like waves, we can’t stop them from coming but we can choose which one to surf’.