WHEN DOES YOUR TRADE END

What a nice image I am using here, I came across it as I was browsing the net, but be careful , do not be misled not even by me, it is not as easy as it looks. Coffee and laptop alone won’t make you any dollars, but education, patience and hard work will definitely do. I love this image though. Warm welcome to all new readers and to the regular ones, thank you for your support. It is good to know you follow.

Strange question with obvious answer I know, relax give yourself time to read and you will understand very well why I ask such question in the first place. But remember, whatever you read from my post, you don’t have to swallow everything that I ”feed you” but only if you  feel it is of great use to you. DEAL…

Back to my question. When you open your position, it is when your trade starts, but it doesn’t end when you close it. This is when it should all begin, at closing, now I sound like I’m contradicting myself, be patient and keep reading. I say the closing is the beginning because this is where i think you should sit back and look at the trade that you just closed. Few things that you can do to post analyze you trade:

• Was it a good trade?

• Why did you enter that trade?

• Which indicators (if you use them) did you use for that particular trade  and were they reliable?

• If you used the stop loss ( which I personally think  it’s always good to use), was it too close or too far, do you think you could have moved  it closer?, those type of questions you know.

• Again if you used a take profit do you think it was too close or too far, try to see if there is anything you could have changed if you were to take the same trade again.

• Which time frame did you use for that trade?

Sounds too much hey, I know, maybe you are reading and even asking yourself why so much admin it is just trading, NO it is not just trading, it is a business, at least to me, I’m not sure about everybody else though. But the intelligent  post analysis that you do will help you in  a long run to develop the strategy that really works for you as an individual, not the strategy that everyone is promoting. I don’t believe in one size fits all mentality, besides, it will help you more to master your skills instead of gloating about profits made. It is not wrong to gloat, but I’m just saying rather do the post analysis on your trades in order to keep getting that beautiful statement of profits. Keep the BEFORE and AFTER journal. Now that I’m writing about all this, it gets me thinking again and again about how on earth would the software do all this for me? but anyway this post is not about whether the so overly praised holy grail software works or not. I just get so irked though whenever I see one of those making false promises and taking advantage of people who are really interested in trading, let me not get started about it, but rather share my trading plan for 2015, thanks to my mentor, I now have this beautiful plan in place for next year, you can use it in making your own and even add-on it or subtract, it is entirely up to you.

FOREX TRADING PLAN:

1.Which currency pairs will I be trading
2.Which CFD’s will I be trading
3.Which days of the week will i be trading
4.How many hours will I be trading
5.Which time frames will I be trading
6.Which days will I not trade
7.Which economic news will I be trading
8.At what point will my stop losses be placed at
9.What would be my profit target
10.How much will I be risking per trade (max)
11.How many trades will I take per day
12.What will I do if I encounter a number of losses in a row
13.What would be my maximum risk exposure at any one time.
14.What percentage will I be looking at making per week/month
15.What will I do if I reach my percentage early

That was just my thoughts, as much as you might be admiring my writing, but bear in mind that what I write is what works for me, you decide whether you think it is good to ”SWALLOW” everything, alter it to suit you, it is your choice. I will make sure to keep the statistics of the trades that I take and I will also have to decide under which circumstances will I use the take profit.  This is my last post for the year 2014 , thank you all for your support and constantly reading my posts. Happy new year to you all , till next year..CHEERS…