[TheNegotiator]

Originally Posted by Tradewinds »

I've decided on a new plan. I will try to be as impulsive as possible, entering trades while reading email, and posting on Trader's Laboratory. I will intentionally try to enter bad trades. I will have a goal of loosing money. I will set stop losses at 3x profit target. I will practice revenge trading, and have absolutely no patience at all. I will have daily loss goals, but try to loose even more. I will only trade during news announcements, lunch time, and in the afternoon when the price is not trending.
I figure that if I try to adhere to this plan, I will fail, and probably make money.

Lol!

I believe plans are imperative to trading well. But where does the ability to follow the plan come from? When I first started trading at a firm, this guy always used to say to me "follow your plan". I honestly don't believe he really understood why this was important and he was almost certainly just parroting it from somewhere else. However, it is crucial to be able to follow your plan.

So what is the key to it? Well, I'll steal an analogy Tams used earlier about driving and take it one step further. Planning your trading is like reading a map and planning a journey before you take a long road trip. What if you plan your journey and halfway through when you aren't sure if you're lost or not, you're informed that the map you planned the trip on was actually a piece of artwork done by a monkey? Or more likely, you rushed out after taking a quick look at your map? My point is, if the map isn't studied or worse still it's fundamentally flawed, how will you have the confidence to actually follow the plan in the future?

So it may seem obvious to many of you and shock horror, actually most of the important stuff which you will learn as a trader is, but actually having a good plan is more than likely imo to be the critical factor in whether you follow it or not. So research and study your data. Analyse and test your plan. PUT THE WORK IN. Then if you have any other issues after that, it's much easier to go back to your work and see that actually just following your plan really should make you money. Btw, I liked very much what edabreu said about the probability of the next trade:-

Originally Posted by edabreu »

So the first thing that comes to mind is that worrying about whether your strategy based trade entry will work this time is pointless and a futile waste of energy. If your strategy is based on soundly tested statistical result backwards and forwards, and your entries and exits have the proper risk reward with the probable expected outcome of your strategy then wondering if this trade will fall into the 70% win side or the 30% loss side is ridiculous.