Saturday, April 23, 2011

Are you making money?

By looking at the features of your trading behavior ,one easily can tell what kind of trader are you or will be come. May be you are making money at this moth or this quarter but in the long run your activity will determine your success in trading.

Some key characters of armature retail traders:
Armature traders usually do not have any written trading plan, when they enter a trade, their position size will always very; they hope trade will go in their way and will make fortune in one trade. They want to be in market all the time, shorter time frame gives them that opportunities. Some trader use 30 seconds time frame witch is not only difficult to trade but impossible for a human brain to react that fast. It’s easy for them to enter a trade but they struggle to get out of a losing trade, usually their losing trades are so big that 10-12 winning trades can even cover that.
One important fact about armature traders are that they always want to enter a trade to the exact level or point but market is random place accuracy is rare here.
They trend to go against the main trend and scalp it to get some quick profit using Bollinger band or any reversal indicator, which often bring disastrous results.
Since they don’t have any plan what so ever, profit taking is much quicker then price action it self.
They can’t relax when they are in a trade and their family life often suffers for that.

Now let’s see what are the characters of successful traders:
They have elaborate written plan which they follow by every word. Capital preservation is the top priority of the plan. Their position changes according to their capital and open positions. Stop levels they use are for emergency exit only.
Their percentage of winning trades is not that great but they usually cash 10 -20 times more then their initial risk. They do not believe in over night success, consistency is they key to their success.
Professional traders separate their family life and trade. They are come quite and calculative. They keep journal of their trades, some trades even video record all trades to see what went wrong, what could have done better to get best out of every trade.