A Forex Trading Plan Example Pt. II

FINDING TRADE CANDIDATES
You can only profit from that which you can anticipate. So here I describe in detail the steps I take to identify potential trading opportunities. I ensure that as many ideas as possible are taken into consideration. I list 13 concrete steps to do this and how to prioritise the trade candidates. One of those steps, indeed, is scanning the trade ideas section of this great website! I take correlations into account between the pairs I trade, to not exceed my trade risk. I may not take a trade if there is a news event pending that impacts the pair, unless it’s a specific news trade I am looking for.

THE PLAYBOOK
Here I describe in full detail, the trade rules for my favorite plays. These are the trade setups that are worth putting capital at risk on. No special sauce here or custom indicators. I trade with time tested, proven set ups that have an edge and can be repeated and verified. For each play I have distinct, concrete rules for entry, for exit, for setting profit targets, for placing the stop loss and for trade management. My plays include breakout trades, news trades with a directional bias, news trades with a non directional bias, continuation plays, reversal plays, advanced price patterns and retracement entries. I manage my trades in a multi position manner, with specific rules to maximize profits while minimizing risk. I describe the tools and indicators I use for each play. The tools I use are Fibonacci (expansion and retracement), structure support and resistance, RSI, Stoch and simple moving average. And off course general charting tools such as the pip measure tool, the long / short position tool, and drawing tools for parallel channels, XABCD, H&S, triangles and trend lines. Plays may exit and enter my playbook, depending on how they perform and if I find new favorite set ups.

DAILY PRE-MARKET ACTIVITES
I describe what I do, daily, before entering the market and placing my first trade. Its basically a checklist that includes items like: reviewing any open trades from the day before, reviewing the action list for any open actions, reviewing overnight news events, reviewing trade candidates on my watch list, logging into Tradingview and my broker platform to see if everything functions properly.

DAILY POST-MARKET ACTIVITIES
I describe what I do, daily, after my regular trading schedule has finished. Its basically a checklist that includes items like: record keeping (updating my trading journal and my money management sheet), reviewing broker information to make sure its correct, updating the action list. I evaluate each trade I made, to see if I followed the rules. Goal is to eliminate mistakes one by one until I eventually run out of mistakes to make.

WEEKLY FOREX MARKET PREVIEW
I describe what I do, weekly, before a new week of trading starts. Think of reading up on all things fundamentals, deciding what theme to focus on the coming week (for instance “Euro weakness”), predicting which will be the “pairs in play”, looking ahead to news events for the coming week and deciding which to trade off (for instance NFP). I always publish a few trade ideas on Tradingview that are the result of this Forex market preview process.

TOOLS / SERVICE PROVIDERS
Here I specify in detail all the tools and subscriptions I use for my trading. For instance Tradingview, an economic calendar, my news provider and my money management spreadsheet are on this list. There are 18 items in total. I describe for each what do to if it breaks down (back up plan) and list the phone numbers of relevant contact persons.

EDUCATION PLAN
Trading is all about skill development and discipline. I have developed an extensive education plan for 2015 and I will stick by it. Too many topics to mention here, but to give an idea, I am looking at MA based strategies, Elliot Wave and new intermarket correlations (among other things).

See also "A Forex Trading Plan Example Pt. I". See the link under Related Ideas.
ForexTrading Plan

You don´t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows - B. Dylan
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