As I mentioned above, journaling your trades is the only way to spot patterns in your trading, both good and bad.
Often the fastest way to improve isn’t by doing more things right, but rather, removing the 2 or 3 biggest things you’re doing wrong.
In other words, you don’t blow up accounts by taking 100% valid trades (according to the plan) with a safe risk.
Instead, traders blow up from over-trading, revenge trading, over-leveraging to make back losses, taking boredom trades, etc.
If you’re not journaling the trades, you’re never going to spot those patterns (both good and bad) making progress all but impossible.
After you’re able to trade without making these mental errors, only then would I look to start editing the structure of the trading plan/process. This would include things such as your entry trigger/location, SL/TP placement, trade management, etc.
This is often backwards from what most people might think but the fact is, the trading strategy you’re using is irrelevant if you lose your $hit and start revenge trading after every loss.
Use this process to fix the mental/emotional errors and then move on to the mechanics of the strategy.
-Sterling
Ive been trading for 2 years without a written trading plan. I’m ashamed to admit it but I’ll be taking steps to rectify that today. thanks Stirling!
Great lesson! I just completed my first month of using written trading plan and journaling the trades and the result is here. I made a 16% gain on my account. It was 20% by 29.04.2020 but on 30.04.2020 decided to trade the high impact news and was stopped out before price sparked to the upside 160 pips on the EURJPY, however, this was a new entry into my written plan “do not trade during high impact news”. Also, this month I traded only as per your strategy and now when analyzing the trades I found a pattern – 3 times I took a set up that occured outside the first 3/4 hours of the US session and all of those were losing trades, and that is another point to write down to my plan for future months. I trust your strategy and now with the written plan & journal I think my trading future looks bright 🙂 In light of the covid-19 lockdowns worldwide they say use the time to learn new skill and that’s what I’m doing – learning to trade forex 🙂 Thanks for sharing strategy tips & tricks with the public and not only to members, although, when I built my account will repay you by joining your members area 🙂 Happy trading! Dimadjo
Hey Don, I love it! It’s amazing what happens when you start treating trading like a business. Keep up the good work bro!