Thought I should talk about a few tips that have helped me progress with my trading journey, hope this post can be helpful if it is!
Having a routine & time blocking
This has been a real game changer, especially when traveling around, since I always have an urge to go out and explore and it becomes extremely easy to jump off the wagon.
I believe that having a morning routine, (I’m not talking about your beauty routine) will really enable you to level up. I can’t recommend enough to always wake up at the same time and do the exact same things in the same order every single day. This will really enable you to create a structure in your day and your brain will be ready to work
No more procrastination!
And more time to relax!
Checkout the video of Michael Bamber on youtube if you want an example of a routine
By following the same routine, you will be ready for the next step even before it happens since it will become programmed into your subconscious.
If you’re not careful it becomes extremely easy to start your morning by checking all your messages which will put you in a reactive state of mind, then opening tinder to see if you got any new matches which shall put your ego in the driver seat etc.
The second benefit of having a routine is that it becomes extremely easy to schedule time for deep work – in the above example, you know that once you get home from your walk you will be fully focused on one task with no distractions for the next hour, so you are already prepared to really give everything.
By time blocking I mean spending an hour on one specific task while having put your phone on the airplane mode, turned your notifications off your laptop and ban yourself from procrastinating. If you want more info about time blocking, I highly recommend you message Jake Andrew on Instagram, he’s the one that got me into it.
Zooming out & looking to the left
By zooming out I mean having a large amount of candles in front of me instead of only looking at the last few hours – to make it easier to understand here’s a comparison between how “zoomed in” I used to be to how “zoomed out” I have now become
This has been a huge gamer changer since not only has it made all the impulses look a hell of a lot smaller and therefore reduced my temptation to take trades after seeing them impulse.
Instead you’ll notice that they barely moved on the larger timescale. Another benefit of zooming out is that it enabled me to have a better understanding of how a pair behaves– has it been trending upwards or downwards or just correcting in a large “box”.
Reduced my temptation to take trades
Better forecasting
Looking left – to the previous price action is also really important since you are able to quickly notice how the pair usually behaves.
For instance I took GBP/CHF in July at a risk entry, but once I realized that the price action wasn’t that clear anymore I did not feel any FOMO closing down the position for breakeven because after looking to the previous price action it was clear that it would give me a lot of opportunities to re-enter the trade.
On top of having a better understanding about how the price is currently moving as well as how it behaves it also enables you to use the bar pattern tool on tradingview in order to copy past price action movement and paste it to today in order to compare what happened then and what is happening now.
Even though there will never be the exact same set-up, it becomes a lot easier to imagine what could happen when you have a real live example.
Focusing on the higher timeframes
As I love trading and I absolutely
hate waiting, which if you know me personally you will have noticed I
thought that I would never say this but, jumping in and out of trades based on
their lower timeframes hasn’t been the best to me. Instead it costed me a lot
of money, especially when I was introduced to the 15min because I was seeing
potential trades everywhere.
It is a common saying in the trading community that multiple timeframe analysis is the key to success in the market and I cannot agree more – it is by combining several timeframes that you will really jump forward in your journey. If the higher timeframes and the lower timeframes both point in the same direction the likelihood of the move taking place is a lot higher.
Multiple timeframe analysis is the key to success
Read this, accept it and implement it
For example, if you have been dating someone for the last five years, live together, have a great sex life and are happy together the likelihood of them saying yes if you propose is a hell of a lot higher than if you were to proposed to someone you picked up in a bar a few hours ago. That’s basically how I see the multiple time frame analysis 😊
More seriously, focusing on trading with the higher timeframes will also enable you to trade less frequently which will not only reduce your commission costs but also reduce the stress you are faced with while also help you become a lot more patient since you know the potential move is large and that you will be presented with a large amount of opportunities.
Another benefit of trading with the backing of the higher timeframes is that you are then able to trade with the trend, which in turn means you will have momentum traders pushing the prices in your favour while also enabling you to place large profit targets.
Meditating
I’m thinking of doing a post by itself on the benefits meditating has had on me and my trading but thought I should talk about it in this one too!
There are many benefits of meditating, however since we are more interested in trading I will bring up a few points that are targeted to it
Having started meditating I am now a lot better at controlling my impulses which in turn has made revenge trading and trying to catch falling knives a lot less frequent, I am not going to say it is the only reason I have managed to reduce those occurrences but it for sure is a key part
It has helped me deal with my ego – which is not a necessarily something you want to delete – since it has enabled me to reflect on actions I have done and also adopt the right mindset, being willing to review what I did and why I did it while also really increasing the amount of time I can focus on the task at hand (and in turn increased my productivity)
Honestly struggling to chose a 3rd point here, but I’ll go with happiness, it has made me a lot happier and more comfortable with who I am and reduced the need to prove everyone I am good enough, which was one of the issues I was dealing with – I always wanted to be able to pick a reversal to prove I knew the market direction instead of waiting for it to show it’s hand.
I really believe that everyone should try to pick up meditating and commit to it for at least three months because for the first month you probably won’t really notice a huge difference but it’s all about compounding those experiences. There are loads of cool apps out there that can guide you if you are new to it, I usually tend to do my meditation with just music from Brain.fm because it really helps me have a quite mind instead of listening to someone’s voice.
Focusing on the execution of my trading plan rather than results
I used to purely judge my trading based off my returns, which at the time made loads of sense to me since it was based on the returns that I can make money and live off my trading, Plus it’s way cooler to share on social media and it makes you feel good when you’re pumping out decent returns
But that’s really not helping you, instead it is probably negatively affecting you since you will either want to take more trades in order to reach a certain monthly percentage return that you haven’t quite yet reached (and lead you to take lower quality set-ups which leads to more losses which make you want to make the money back – which lead you to take more trades etc…)
I’ve been there, done that and it’s not great… Take my word for it :S
Instead by focusing on the execution of your trading plan you can really look and compare your returns to what the market made available to you over the month, sometimes that may be a small amount of positions other times a lot more. By focusing on the execution of your plan – as in number of high probability trades to valid trades (and having a low number ideally 0 not valid trades) you will take a step forward since you will make sure that your ratio of HP to Valid is high.
Focus on your trading plan execution.
The % return will come according to your plan, not the other way round.
Another benefit of comparing your returns to what your trading plan showed is that you become a lot more aware that other people have a different trading style than you and therefore you definitely can’t or at least shouldn’t compare your returns to theirs. That in turn will reduce the impact your trading returns have on your ego and will make you a happy person.
Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed this post, let me know if you want more information about any of these or would like to add something. I have made a lot of tweaks so these aren’t the only ones but just a handful I have taken along my journey.
If you enjoyed this article feel free to share it with anyone that will benefit from it!
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