Thursday, June 26, 2008

Plan Your Trade & Trade According To Your Plan

Reminder to All Forex Trader

I find what helps emotionally is to have a plan before you place your trade and then trade to that plan. That way you do not have to start making funny decisions about entry, exits, take profit etc during a trade.

How I manage my trade?

Entry…

All entry is based on specific setup; personally I have few setups to attack GJ… But all entry is depending on my analysis. When I perform the analysis, basically I want to decide either I want to take long, short or both. It’s all depend on risk:reward ratio. If my long entry unable to give at least > 1:1.5 risk reward – I wait for another opportunity.

Exit & TP…

Personally, I have a predetermined number of pips that I want to protect once I am x number of pips in front and leaving the rest to run. I love to create free ride trade. However, it's just my way of managing my trades and it helps me emotionally and keeps me disciplined (i.e following a plan).

Trading is about risk control

Another factor, and it is important to been mentioned here, is that if a trade is causing one much anxiety, then probably it may be due to taking on too much risk. So the logical step would be to cut down on the size of the trade until you feel comfortable with it and feel less inclined to "interfere" with the trade, letting your pre-determined trade plan play out itself. I used to trade too big a position for my account and that affected me greatly in that I was watching every tic with constant thoughts of "Shall I take profit now? Shall I cut my losses now? etc. ". I wasn't able to trade any pre-determined plans I had for my trades because of the anxiety and strong compulsion to close the trades prematurely. Well, that's all history now since I started trading at a more sensible size and can withstand several losing trades without seriously damaging my account. At the moment I never risk more than 2% on each per entry. I only consider to enter new trade after this setup become Free Ride Setups…

Forex Trading Is A Business, It Is Not A Game.

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