A Page for Your Trader’s Handbook

Here are five things that you NEED to know about trading:

1. If you don’t know what you’re risking…you’re all in!

2. Three easy steps to develop consistent, confident trading

3. Trust yourself. This comes from doing the “hand work” of drawing retracements “back in time”, demo trading in a live demo account (not just on paper, and especially not just in your head). Trusting yourself in this fashion will allow you to act in your favor…quickly and profitably.

4. Follow the steps! This will build your confidence in the process and your long-term anxiety will go down. Remember, you’re used to getting a paycheck, or having production schedules, or income projections based on population growth…whatever you used to use as an income benchmark is gone, bye-bye, sayonara baby! But in the end, weren’t those just guesses? Following the process will give you confidence – a crutch if you will – in your long-term success just like your old “crutches” did.

5. If you have a trigger…follow it! That’s why you’re using a demo account, at first. Remember:
a. Look for the pattern
b. Look for the ratio
c. Look for the risk

Here’s a list, in no particular order, for your ‘trader’s handbook’:

1. Probabilities are King! The market is going to do, well, whatever the hell it wants to do. Don’t get caught trying to “out-think” or “out-maneuver” the market. No method is going to tell you what will happen next, so take each trade as it comes – and know that your profits are in the ‘long pull’.

2. If you’re scared, you get tunnel vision. You start acting like a caged animal, men will reach physically, women (typically) with heightened emotion.. you’ll start to fool yourself and doing really stupid stuff. Don’t trade scared.

3. It is not a mistake being wrong…only staying wrong.

4. Managing your money (risk) is your #1 priority…not your patterns, not your “luck”, not your ego. Never, ever let yourself be exposed to unlimited risk by not placing a stop. Remember: a stop protects you from yourself…your inability to make good decisions – like when the market scares the piss out of you by instantly reversing against your new position.

5. If you haven’t calculated the risk - don’t get in the trade.

6. If you find yourself saying “If the market can only come back to X, I’ll get out” – just get the hell out…if you’re wrong. Don’t be stupid and stay wrong.

7. There is an old saying among commodity traders: “Take care of the losses, and the profits will take care of themselves”. This is a process of making money, not of being right or wrong.

8. Write your rules in pen, and your observations with a pencil (but know when to break the rules!).

9. Develop your discipline…that way you can keep your focus on the plan, not the conflict of the market.