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Want To Trade Forex Like An Expert? Keep A Journal

How Keeping A Journal Can Help You Grow And Improve As A Trader

Why? Simple. A journal is an invaluable tool for thinking through opportunities and risks, as well as for growing emotional self-awareness — a key part of trading.

A good trading journal should used for two purposes:

Use Number 1: Separating Facts From Interpretations

First, it should contain an analytical section where you can explore market facts and your interpretations of those facts. What do I mean by facts and interpretations? The highs and lows a currency pair reaches over the course of three days is a fact. So are the cost of spread, commissions, and amount of leverage you are using. However, the belief that the market may trend one way or another or the market will be strong or weak — these are interpretations. Learning to tell the difference between the two — and to question your interpretations — can lead to smarter, better forex trades. It can also help you spot opportunities you might otherwise have missed.

 

Use Number 2: Building Your Mental Game

Second, your journal should contain a section where you explore your thoughts and emotions towards the forex market and your performance on it. You should ask yourself questions like “What am I feeling right now?”, “What trading decisions do I normally make when I feel this way?”, and “What has usually been the result in the past? Did I lose or make money?” Exploring your emotions in this way can be a great way of developing emotional self-awareness and recognizing the many ways your emotional state impacts your trading — both are key traits of superior traders.

Top Tip: Keeping A Trading Journal Can Be Key To Your Development As A Trader

 
 

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blog16

Want To Trade Forex Like An Expert? Control Your Environment

Why  Building A Supportive Forex Trading Environment Is Important

What do I mean by supportive trading environment? I mean that no one exists in a vacuum. Many things outside the actual forex market itself — from the physical environment you trade in to your personal circumstances at the time you are trading — can impact your trading performance. Maybe you have skeptical family members that are giving you a bad case of performance anxiety. Maybe you don’t have enough funds in reserve, which causes adverse anxiety and pressure that impacts your performance. Whatever the reason may be, the outside world impacts your performance just as much as market conditions.

Top Tip: The Outside World Matters

Knowing what outside factors impact your trading performance — and setting up your environment to support your best performance — can be a good way to improve your trading.

 

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Tags:

AUD, Brexit, Brexit, Banks, CAD, CHF, CNH. currency hedging, CZK, Donald Trump, EU EUR, forex trading, GBP, Global, Growth, Fears, Gold Prices, Government Shutdown, HKD, Is forex trading profitable, JPY Leverage, Mean Reversion, MXN, NOK, NZD, Passive income, popular strategies, Risk Management, RUB, Safe, haven currencies, second referendum, SEK SGD, Silver, Price, technical indicators, trading account, Trading Basics, trading psychology, Trailing Stop, trump wall, TRY USD, USD Price, Chart, XAG, XAU, ZAR,

 

 

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Want To Trade Forex Like An Expert? Your Trading Log Is Key

Why Study Your Trading Log?

Just as with keeping a journal, downloading and analysing your trading log — or the record of your trading history recorded on your trading platform — can be key to gaining valuable insights into the forex market.

You might notice, for example, that while you’ve opened many different positions on many different currency pairs over a certain period of time, only one or two (or none) turned a profit for you. This might be a sign that you are spreading your attention over too many trades and, thus, you should focus on fewer. On a similar note, you might find that you trade best early in the morning or late at night.

These are just examples, of course. The insights you uncover will, of course, be specific to you. Analyzing your past performance is key to discovering them.  

Top Tip: Studying Your Trading Log Can Be a Great Path To Growth

Your trading log can help you discover everything from the trading style that works best for you to what currency pairs or commodities you do best with. Ignore it at your peril.

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Want To Trade Forex Like An Expert? Control Your Risk

Want to step above the crowd? Knowing when to cut your losses and being consistent and disciplined about doing so can help you truly elevate your trading game.

Why Controlling Risk Is Key To Developing As A Trader

At first glance, this sounds rather obvious, doesn’t it? It may surprise you, but far too many traders lose more money than they can afford by sticking with bad trades in the hope that things will turn around for them. In reality, this rarely happens.

Smart traders, in contrast, set firm stopping points with their broker before ever opening their trades. If their losses drop below the level set, they understand that the best thing they can do is to walk away.  While this sounds easy enough to do, actually doing it consistently in real life can be quite hard. It’s basic human psychology to try to hold on to what we perceive as ours and to recoup losses. Fighting through that urge and learning to walk away will put you head and shoulders above many traders, however.

Top Tip: Planning Is Key

Have a plan about how and when to cut your losses and be disciplined and consistent about sticking to it. For example, determine what percentage of your equity can you afford to lose before making a trade and set a stop-loss order to ensure you don’t go beyond it.

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How To Develop Your First Forex Trading Plan

The ability to create and follow a forex trading plan is one of the most important things a forex trader must learn. Many new forex traders fall into the trap of either not creating a plan or failing to stick to the ones they do create. Doing either is a big mistake and leads to irrational, hasty, and emotional decision-making (very bad things when it comes to forex).

The process of creating a forex trading plan will help you understand your trading strategy thoroughly and serve as a blueprint for making trading decisions. If you design your trading plan correctly, the unexpected should not be an issue  – you should have already thought out and have a course of action for just about anything that might occur.

So how do you create a plan? In this post, we’ll take you through it from start to finish.

Oh, one thing to note before we go any further:  

Having a trading plan alone is not enough. You should also be keeping a detailed trading journal to help you keep track of how consistently you are following your trading plan. In the following article, we’ll take you through the steps of creating your first plan.

1. Determine What Kind Of Trader You Are – And How Many Trades You Should Make

The first step to creating a forex trading plan is to determine what kind of trader you are based on the frequency of your trades and the duration over which your trades run. If you are a day trader whose trading style revolves around scalping, then you should plot your trading plan with a 24-hour timeframe. On the other hand, if you are a swing trader whose trades usually span several days, you should use a week as your planning horizon. To determine the number of trades that you should make within your trading horizon, you should add up all your winning trades  over your chosen time period and then multiply them by 1.2. For example, if you make 15 trades a week and only five are winning trades, you should not make more than six or seven trades each week. The idea is to increase your win rate and your chances of being an effective forex trader.

2. Maximize Your Opportunities

By limiting the number of trades that you make on a daily basis you limit your opportunities in the markets. This is not a bad thing. Limiting the number of trades you make on a daily basis should allow you to focus on finding the best trade setups that match your trading plan. By making fewer trades, you will be able to focus more on analyzing your trades and on making trades that have a beneficial risk/reward ratio.

 

3. Eliminate Emotional Trading

As a beginner forex trader, you should strive to avoid making trades based on your emotions by always sticking to your predetermined trading parameters. By limiting the number of trades you make each day, you can more easily avoid making ‘revenge’ trades. This can happen after you make a bad trade when you make further trades in an attempt to make up your losses. Many new traders succumb to the urge to make emotional rebalancing trades in order to make up for their losing trades. Most emotional trades usually carry higher risk because their main objective is to recoup the losses on a previous trade, which might be significant.

4. Set Entry Rules

Most beginner traders start out being very excited about the movements of the currency pairs they want to trade and will typically open new trades based on an instinct alone. This is not the best way to trade as, in many cases, traders end up with open positions that they have not fully thought through or researched. Your trading plan should clearly describe the signals that you will look for before opening a trade. You should include the different parameters that the indicators you are using must meet in order for you to enter into a trade. The more detailed your plan is, the better your results will be. Having a clearly defined entry rules will ensure that you remain disciplined in all your trading activities.

 

5. Set Exit Rules

Having exit rules is just as important as having entry rules because having predetermined exit signals helps you maximize the potential gains on your trades while limiting your losses. Your exit rules should be aligned with the maximum risk you are willing to take on each trade as well as the profit potential of each trade. For example, a trader with a 1:3 risk/reward ratio would be willing to risk USD 50 dollars for a profit of USD 150 on each trade. This means that the trader should exit a losing trade once their losses reach USD 50 and should look to exit a profitable trade with a  USD 150 profit.

6. Set Stop-Loss And Take-Profit Levels

 

Now that you know the importance of setting entry and exit rules, stop-loss and take-profit levels are  next. It is crucial that you set a stop-loss level on every trade that you make in order to limit your potential losses one every trade. You should think this through ahead of time and should tie your stop loss to the percentage of your trading account that you are willing to risk.

 

Conclusion

Now that you have a good understanding of how to create your trading plan, you should get to work creating one using a free Demo trading account The Demo account will allow you to test and refine your current trading plan on either our MT4 of MT5 platforms and will enable you to pinpoint weaknesses in your plan. Once you are satisfied that your plan works in you Demo account, you can consider using it in you live account. 

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