When it comes to New Year’s resolutions, most people have already made up their minds by the end of January. Any fitness club owner will tell you that membership numbers increase significantly in the first week of the year, but most people will tell you that he stops going regularly within a month or two. A sad but true fact about human nature is that most people simply lack the mental “tools” to plan and execute them.
I want you to be different in 2019 than you were in 2018. Whatever goals you think you didn’t achieve in 2018, forget about it. The past is the past, as they say. All we can do is look to the future, modify our actions, stick to our plans, and improve ourselves for the coming New Year.
As traders, we all have weak areas that we would like to strengthen. The new year gives us a fresh start, a blank slate, so to speak, an opportunity to start fresh and try to fix any major problems we may have had in the past year. . I want you to take this lesson very seriously and practice the exercises in it. Doing so can actually make or break your trading account in 2019.
Below is a list of the major problems I know my students are facing and how to solve them. It’s broken down into small achievable goals that you can work on daily and weekly.
Closing a deal too early
How many times in 2018 did you find yourself closing a trade too early? This can be a really frustrating problem. Closing a trade just before it actually takes a turn for the better. Consistently small profits won’t make you a successful trader, because you need to hit a “home run” every once in a while to make up for your losses and turn a profit. Here are some practical tips on how to stop closing out early and start clinging to big market moves.
- Remember, it takes longer than you think to get a good deal. That is, strong movements often go farther than you might expect. The only unknown is how long it will take to do so and this is what trips up most traders. It takes patience to keep winning trades, but you also need to stop watching too many trades. Believe me, I say that checking my trades too often is like the “kiss of death” for traders, because I’ve been through it myself more than I can remember. .
- Develop a trade exit strategy when entering a trade, or rather before entering. This way you don’t have to rely on last-minute emotional decisions that are usually the wrong ones to get you out. Of course, market conditions may change dramatically and an early exit may be warranted, but knowing this will take time and experience, and never until you prove yourself that you can continue. What you shouldn’t do. To a tougher trade exit plan. Just pre-define your exit with a risk reward of 1:2 or higher for every trader who enters and stick to it. Let’s be honest, in 2019 he did one thing and he’s probably far ahead of 2018. You’ll be amazed at how much you can achieve with just a little bit of self-discipline and consistent adherence to a predefined plan.
I miss good deals because I’m afraid to enter
How many times have you sat there just staring at a pinbar signal with multiple confluences behind it and instead of accepting a trade, start looking for 20 reasons why the trade “might not work”? Many traders do this for fear of loss. Yes, you can lose money in any trade, but remember that the only way to minimize the emotional impact of trading is to reduce the risk per trade to a level you can emotionally handle. you should already know. Here are some steps you can take to reduce, and hopefully eliminate, the fear that your trading performance will be ruined next year.
- Don’t overthink the deal. If you find a clear, high-quality signal of price action that meets your trading plan criteria, set a trade and hit the road. Don’t sit down and google to find lots of reasons why a deal isn’t going well. I have news. Any trade can lose. But what we’re doing here is trading edges, and you have to trade edges to have a chance to make money in the long run. You can’t make money if you don’t think of yourself in every transaction and act like a deer in the headlights.
- Do not risk more than you can afford to lose on each trade. This helps greatly reduce the amount of fear felt during the process of trading and trading analysis. As long as you know your risk per trade is limited to an amount you can sleep soundly on, you’ll be fine.
Unrealistic about the nature of the transaction
guess what? You will lose some trades. Please deal with it. But seriously, learning how to lose properly is a prerequisite to making money as a trader. If you can’t manage your risk and control your urge to overtrade, you’ll end up losing a lot of money and blowing your account. To better understand the nature of the market and what is really possible, here are some actionable steps you can take this year.
- Remember: A given trading edge has a random distribution of wins and losses. Wins and losses are always randomly distributed, even when trading with my Price Action strategy or any other technique. This means that you may have a 60% win rate over the course of a year, but you never know which trades will win and which trades will lose. So with a 60% win rate, you could lose 4 out of 10 trades in a row, but with 100 trades, you could lose much more than lose 4 in a row. Your win rate may remain at 60%. So you have to ask yourself, “Am I good enough to take a losing streak?” Ultimately, it’s important to manage your bankroll properly and not overtrade.
- Stop expecting to get rich quick. What does “get rich quick” look like for the average forex trader? What if you added a position because it went up, then the market reversed and suddenly the second position was negative? I ruined the deal because of that. Be realistic about what is possible and avoid the dollar sign. Remember that markets have ebbs and flows, and if a position makes a profit and rises significantly, the market can quickly reverse. If you’re going to put a pyramid into your position, you should pull back inside the trend most of the time and then do so, not just when the market is in your favor and probably overstretched in that direction.
Be greedy: take too many risks and trade too much
It’s been said a million times, but it never holds true. Bulls make money, bears make money, but pigs are slaughtered.
Do you want to make money or be ‘slaughtered’ by the market? Seems like an obvious answer, right? Well, most traders act as if they want to be slaughtered by the market. Here’s how to avoid it in 2019.
- It seems obvious, but let’s be honest, most traders aren’t doing this and probably aren’t doing it. Control the risk per trade. How much risk are you risking per trade? That amount is a good night’s sleep without the nasty urge to turn on your laptop at 3am and check out what the market is doing. Because if you commit this sin, you will lose more than you sleep and not only will you lose your trading capital, but you will lose even more if you can’t control yourself. because it may suffer from
- If you trade too much, you will become greedy, so just change the way you do it. Traders tend to think that if they don’t take a lot of risk they aren’t greedy, but even if they manage their risk well, they are still greedy if they trade too often. You want to adopt a low-frequency trading approach in 2019. This, combined with risk management, helps eliminate the devastating effects of greed on trading accounts.
return profits
Does your trading account always go up and then go right back up? You want it to go up consistently with only small drops in between, right? should stop doing it. There are many reasons why traders return profits, but here are a few points to help you overcome this problem in 2019.
- After winning a trade, you should remove yourself from the computer and charts. Don’t sit there looking for another deal right away. The deal might not exist, but if you sit there and look for it, it might show up. Traders are most at risk of overtrading immediately after exiting a winning trade. They feel good, they feel great. That’s fine, but you should use that positive energy for something other than trading. Otherwise, you’ll be returning the benefits you’ve been waiting so patiently for.
- If you’re giving up profits simply because you can’t secure them, you need to have a plan to secure them. A while ago I wrote an article about a simple trade exit strategy that you can use to actually secure your profits instead of letting them go to waste.
Lack of a suitable strategy or trading approach
Of course, if you don’t have the right trading strategy or strategy (many traders don’t), you’re not going anywhere anytime soon. You’d be surprised how many traders are simply ‘attacking from the hip’ in the market, in other words, entering randomly without really having a solid approach or trading method.
I encourage you to learn to read price action on charts and employ the price action based strategies I teach. Because this is the easiest and most “accurate” way to trade the market. No need to cover your chart with cluttered indicators. This only complicates the whole trading process.
Conclusion
If 2018 trading performance doesn’t live up to your expectations, there’s only one thing you can do. Learn from it and move on. It doesn’t make sense to resent what could have been, or to rehash past mistakes over and over again. Learn from your mistakes, grow as a trader, use them as a tool to improve yourself, and don’t let them hold you back.
We hope the ideas and insights contained in today’s lesson will give you the kickstart you need to tackle 2019 with a clear head and the right trading mindset. Remember, big goals like “become a successful or profitable trader” are not achieved overnight or all at once. Rather, they are the culmination of many small goals that you worked hard to achieve. Any lofty goal should be broken down into smaller “consumable” pieces that are more realistic and routinely measurable. I hope that the lessons I’ve given you on this blog this year and further explained in my professional trading courses will help you master each aspect of trading you need to become a profitable trader. .
I hope that all of you have a happy new year. Thank you for following me and reading my lessons. If its helpful then im happy. We look forward to helping you even more in 2019. –Nial Fuller
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