Plan Your Trade… Trade Your Plan

Several people have asked me if I can guide them so that they can have a clear path towards the development of profitability in forex trading and the achievement of a profitable system methodology. Today’s post will be dedicated to one of the most popular phrases amongst profitable traders and one of the most “easy” and efficient ways in which a person can become consistently more knowledgeable about the forex market and the achievement of manual profitability. Plan your trade and trade your plan.

Many of you may have heard this phrase, but what does it mean ? It means several things but it simply states that you should know what you are going to do and then you should do it. To put it simple, a person should not get into any trade before doing a full analysis of when to get in, how to trade and when to get out and then the person should execute the trade as the person planned. If I plan to enter at B, then exit at E or A risking C then that is exactly what I do. Consistency, in other words between what one intends to do and what one does in practice.

But how can this help me achieve long term profitability ? – you ask – well, one of the things I found that helped me the most in the beginning was to take ANY trading system and just make a plan around it and trade it exactly as I had planned. Profitable or not there are several things you will learn about this :

– You will learn how the market works. As you watch the market and execute your trades you will gather more knowledge about what is good and what is wrong with your methodology and more profitable methodologies will become obvious.

– You will learn to control your emotions. You will be able in the long term to simply execute your plan regardless of how the market behaves or how the loss of money makes you feel.

It is important that you do NOT change your system every trade. Take any method, like my support and resistance trading methodology and use it with a 1% risk per trade and trade with it for 6 months. You will see that you will start to get better and better as you develop your skills in trading. Give yourself a treat everytime you follow your plan to the letter and a punishment (for example like one week with no trading) when you don’t follow your plan. In the first few months you may write in your log some trades as “impulse trades” and allow you to take some trades based on emotions. You will notice that after one or two months your “impulse” trades will be responsible for a very big part of your loses.

I essence, planning your trade and trading your plan is a vital part of trading, either manual or automated. Always have a plan when you trade, treat this like a business if you intend it to be one. If you would like to learn more about my approach to automated trading and how you too can achieve realistic profit and risk targets using automated trading please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or subscribing to my weekly newsletter to receive updates and check the live and demo accounts I am running with several expert advisors. I hope you enjoyed the article !

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