When you open your charts in the beginning of the day, don't rush into first trade you see.
Step back for a little while, and check in with your emotions. If you want to trade cause you didn't have a trade in a while, or you're bored, or you want to make your money back, or if you just want to make money and now you "know the market will go up (down)" - these all are signs of emotional imbalance. if you feel like this, it's better just to make a pause. Yes, it can be hard to do it by the way, but you need to make it through your will effort.
So, instead of putting a trade right away, go through your multitimeframe analysis, mark up the zones and set your alerts for zones you really like. more on this here
While you're waiting for alerts to go off, you can do a lot of useful things for your trading. first of all, go through your checklist or trading plan, or a journal, and remind yourself how your best, high-quality setups look like.
Now go back to previous week or two, and just look in hindsight for your highquality patterns, whatever strategy you use. See how market developed and find entry points which will be in line with your rules. You can even make a step further and journal these hindsight trades in a separate journal (I call it mark ups, or "missed trades"). This simple action will train your pattern recognition skills and also develop a habit of working with a journal. In the future you'll come back to these trades for reference of how your best setups can look like.
Now, if the alert is still not activated, do some backtesting, 5-10 trade would be enough, but also journal these trades.
Doing this, you're already few steps ahead of your competitors become not many people are willing to put such kind of effort in their trading.
Well done, and now it's time to go and check how the market is developing. More on building the routing and good habits you can read in this series of posts
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