Why I Prefer Swing Trading Over Day Trading
Introduction: When it comes to trading, the choice between day trading and swing trading can significantly impact your stress levels, decision-making, and overall success. In this article, I’ll explain why I choose swing trading over day trading, focusing on the benefits of a more relaxed approach that aligns better with my trading style and goals.
1. Day Trading Can Be Stressful
Constant Monitoring: Day trading requires you to be glued to your screen, monitoring every market movement. This constant vigilance can lead to significant stress and fatigue, affecting both your physical and mental well-being.
Emotional Pressure: The need to make rapid decisions can push traders into emotionally charged trades. The pressure to act quickly often results in mistakes, leading to losses that could have been avoided with more time and analysis.
2. Swing Trading Offers a More Relaxed Approach
Less Time-Intensive: Swing trading allows you to analyze the market at a more leisurely pace. You don’t need to monitor every tick, giving you the freedom to balance trading with other life activities.
Better Decision-Making: With swing trading, you have more time to evaluate market trends, conduct thorough analysis, and make informed decisions. This approach reduces the likelihood of making impulsive trades based on short-term market noise.
3. Swing Trading Aligns with Price Action Strategies
Focus on Market Movements: Swing trading aligns well with price action trading, where the focus is on understanding market movements over days or weeks. This method allows you to identify and capitalize on significant trends without getting caught up in the daily fluctuations.
Fewer Trades, More Thoughtful Entries: Swing traders make fewer trades, but each one is carefully planned and based on a broader market perspective. This thoughtful approach often leads to better long-term results.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, while day trading may appeal to those who thrive on the excitement and rapid pace of the markets, it can also lead to significant stress and emotional trading. Swing trading, on the other hand, offers a more balanced and thoughtful approach, allowing traders to focus on long-term success without the constant pressure of day trading. For these reasons, I choose to focus on swing trading, where I can maintain a healthier lifestyle and make more informed, less emotionally driven trading decisions.
This approach emphasizes the importance of aligning your trading strategy with your lifestyle and psychological strengths, ultimately leading to better trading outcomes.
Swingtrader
HOLDING UP MY 3 SWING POSITIONSWe are almost done with the first week of the year 2024, and still, my 3 open swing positions are holding up.
Currently, if I close all these 3 positions now, the results will generally GAIN.
I will keep holding this as long as the market does not hit my SL and TSL.
Happy Trading everyone in this Community!!!
Learn TOP 3 Elements of a Perfect SWING TRADE
Hey traders,
In the today's post, I will share with you a formula of ideal swing trading setup.
✔️Element 1 - Market Trend
When you are planning a swing trade, it is highly recommendable that the direction of your trade would match with the direction of the market trend.
If the market is trading in a bullish trend, you should look for buying the market, while if the market is bearish, you should look for shorting.
Take a look at CHFJPY pair on a daily. Obviously, the market is trading in a bullish trend and your should look for swing BUYING opportunity.
✔️Element 2 - Key Level
You should look for a trading opportunity from a key structure.
IF the market is bullish, you should look for buying from a key horizontal or vertical SUPPORT, WHILE if the market is bearish, you should look for shorting from a key horizontal or vertical RESISTANCE.
CHFJPY is currently approaching a rising trend line - a key vertical support.
Please, note that if the price is NOT on a key structure, you should patiently wait for the test of the closest one.
✔️Element 3 - Confirmation
Once the market is on a key level, do not open a trading position blindly. Look for a confirmation - for the sign of strength of the buyers, if you want to buy or for the sign of strength of the sellers, if you are planning to short.
There are dozens of confirmation strategies, one of the most accurate is the price action confirmation.
Analyzing a 4H time frame on CHFJPY, we can spot a falling wedge pattern. While the price is stuck within that, the minor trend remains bearish. Bullish breakout of the resistance of the wedge will be the important sign of strength of the buyers and can be your strong bullish confirmation.
Following these 3 conditions, you will achieve high win rate in swing trading. Try these techniques yourself and good luck in your trading journey.
How To Use Time Frame Combination For Swing Trading OANDA:NZDUSD
OANDA:EURUSD
Hello Traders,
This video will show you how to use time frames and combine them for swing trading from a higher time frame to a lower time frame.
I use recent NZDUSD and EURUSD move to frame swing trade opportunities from a higher time frame to a lower time frame.
I hope this video helps you.
Don't forget to give me a like and a follow for future updates.
If there is anything you want me to cover, drop a comment on it.
My Backtesting Results on NZDCHFHolding trades is what I want to get better at and backtesting is going to help me do it.
I've backtested NZDCHF today and found that it was a remarkable session.
I was able to enter 4 trades in the span of 3 months gaining over what would have been 15% from the trades, but one trade hit my break even point so I gained around 12% from my trades.
I used the monthly, weekly, and daily timeframes with most of my entries coming from the daily timeframe.
I used my own strategy known as TMP. It stands for Trend, Market Structure, Price Action(or, pending orders).
I identify the trend first, then set my estimation zone, then place my pending order. In that order, thats it.
I don't use support and resistance, trend lines, or indicators for the most part. I like using price action. Its my preference that has changed throughout my trading career.
I've noticed I a few reasons why I don't enter my best setups are due it
1) Money trauma( family had poor money management)
2) Time limit( pressure from showing results)
To get over those, I have set parameters to take partials, move my trades to break even, and set pending orders to eliminate myself not entering my own trades.
This helps in the long run and has helped since collecting data on myself since the start of me using prop firms.
I can only pray that through my backtesting and trading journey, this can help you too.
Please let me know if you have questions regarding my backtesting or found something unique that helped you.
Safe trading❤️
🔻 How To Swing Trade In A Bear Market 🔻Forex traders that decide to trade in a bear market are looking for a strategy or a way to make a profit when markets are falling. But, is it possible to swing trade in a bear market? It is. The most used strategy in bear market trading is the swing strategy. Traders that want to swing trade must first understand the swing trade meaning. Swing trade is a trading path that comes with challenges. While many traders prefer to stay profitable in a continuing bull market, many traders will choose to earn their profit by swing trading in the following bear market. Swing trading is challenging but can also be profitable in short-term intervals. A trader must know how to use the given signals from the market before starting to swing trade in a bear market.
How To Do Swing Trading
Traders often wonder how to swing trade forex, and the first thing to know is the swing trade definition first:
Swing trading is a type of trading style that focuses on profiting from changing trends in price action in short-term intervals. Swing trading is a trading strategy that involves holding a position long or short for more than one session. It can be from one day up, but not longer than several weeks.
Traders that use this strategy look to technical and fundamental analysis. They try to explore trading opportunities and analyze price trends and patterns. Considering the volatile conditions in the forex market, a swing trader tries to catch a potential price movement and make a small profit out of it. Generally, swing trading is a good strategy for beginners because they can trade with much less capital than the other trading strategies.
Is It Possible To Swing Trade In A Bear Market?
A bear market in forex means that prices fall 20% or more from recent highs, which gives the traders a negative outlook and hopelessness. A bear market is always caused by a group of developments or events such as monetary conditions, monetary policy, shifts in yield curves, and many others. The forex market is very volatile and changes very fast. It creates many opportunities to catch the momentum of price action and make a profit out of it. Swing trading is one of the trading options in a bear market.
Implementing a swing trading strategy for the bear market is one way for a forex trader to trade successfully. To swing trade profitably in a bear market, traders need to have a strategy likely to survive the changing market conditions. Swing trading in a bear market does work but usually can give the trader a tough time. Traders need to do a market analysis, research all historical data, and create a safe trading plan before going live.
What Is Swing Trading And Its Advantages?
Swing trading is a short-term trading strategy where you hold your trades for one day up to a few weeks at most. Swing traders use technical analysis, to make a trading plan, and a strategy for an entry and exit from the market. Swing trading can be divided into discretionary swing trading and systematic swing trading. From experience, traders have found systematic swing trading more efficient, as it has shown better results.
Advantages Of Swing Trading
Traders know their results quickly, from one day up to one month. They give time to work on the swing strategy and make changes on the next entry. The trader has a clear boundary because there is a specific area to observe, knowing exactly when the trade isn't working. Traders can easily limit the damage of a losing position. By entering and leaving the market in short periods, traders can identify a lot of opportunities. It allows the trader to spread the risk and minimize losses. It is important to mention that swing trading is a very good trading strategy for forex beginners and traders that are short on time.
Swing Trade Strategy For A Bear Market
Swing trading can make a trader's way much easier if they use one of the trading indicators and stick to it. The most are moving averages, Relative Strength Index (RSI), Stochastic Oscillator, and Volume. A trader has many options to create a swing trading strategy for bear market conditions. Traders also use mean reversion as the most common strategy type. In mean reversion, traders assume that the market will make some extreme moves to either side, and those moves are later corrected through a reversion to the mean. It means that the market tends to swing around its average. This strategy type, a mean reversion, is used to identify if the market is overbought or oversold. It is expected to give traders an entry signal.
A different swing trade strategy is trend following, which is the opposite of the mean reversion type. This strategy suggests following the trend of direction, which is harder to succeed with than the mean reversion type. The breakout strategy is another type of swing strategy that traders use. This strategy is similar to the trend following, and it works with a breakout level. When the currency pair breaks a level and continues above that level, it is a signal that the market is solid enough and will likely continue in the direction of the breakout. This strategy is functioning the same way as the trend-following strategy. Traders do not always buy on a breakout of a certain level. Often, traders try to include other conditions that are important in deciding whether to buy or sell.
Can Swing Traders Make Money In A Bear Market?
Not many traders choose to trade in a bear market because it signals pessimism, and it is hard to know how long it will last. In a bear market, the primary trend is to the downside, and different rules apply. Knowing the bear market trading rules can position traders to benefit from them. That gives light on the pessimism of a bear market. There are many opportunities to make money for traders that know how to use the given signals. Taking a bear short swing trade, also called short-selling, will help you to gain profit using a swing strategy during a bear market. Traders need to do pre-market research, then work up to potential trades before they make an entry position.
How To Use Higher Time Frames To Swing TradeIf you struggle with what timeframes to analyze longer movements before entering trades, this video is for you.
I personally struggled with multiple timeframe analysis. I thought I had to use every timeframe to enter a trade. It wasn't until I got clear on the type of trader I was and stuck to two timeframes at a time is when the market began to become more clear to me. If you can relate this video is for you.
3 Types of Traders: Which Are You?3 Types of Traders: Which Are you?
There are many different approaches of trading the financial markets that has provoked countless methods and strategies to be created over the decades.
One popular way to simplify & view this is to break it down into 3 types of traders which is categorised by two main factors which include the trading frequency & timeframes used by each one of the trading types.
1️⃣ Scalper
The large majority of beginner traders end up starting out with this type of trading because of numerous reasons. But mainly, this is due to the fast pace that the market moves, presenting many trading opportunities and giving off the perception of an opportunity to get rich quick.
Ironically, this trading style is then considered as one of the most easiest and successful ways of trading by beginner traders, while being stated by professional traders to be one of the most difficult.
Scalpers often have dozens of trading positions open at a time during multiple trading sessions and need to be in front of the charts at all times. Therefore, paying huge commissions to their broker due to spreads also making this type of trading have a high cost to it. Not to mention the chaos in lower timeframe analysis that eventually results in the majority to stop trading.
This is not to say that you cannot be successful with scalping. However, the main obstacle alongside many other with scalping, is the level of constant focus & rapid-decision making required which can have massive negative effects on your overall trading psychology if not kept in check.
2️⃣ Intraday
Intraday or day trading is the most popular type of trading amongst retail traders and is what I prefer the most myself.
Staying relatively active, the market gives some time for the trader to reflect & think upon their analysis on the pairs they are analysing. Opening and managing on average ~1-2 positions per trading session, the intraday approach offers a degree of freedom.
But does come at a cost due to the declining amount of volume and volatility, intraday traders may experience low risk:reward setups because of the average daily range of many pairs on the market.
3️⃣ Swing
Swing trading is the best choice for individuals who want to pursue trading while having a full-time occupation outside of trading. This is possible due to this type of trading primarily focusing on the higher timeframes such as daily/weekly for a large proportion of their analysis.
Thus, swing trading is not demanding when being combined with an individuals typical daily routine and trading psychology since they aim to catch mid/long-term market movements.
With an average trade holding length of 2 weeks and only 1-2 positions being placed per week. Swing trading is regarded to be one of the least emotional approaches and involves low cost of trading with great risk:reward setups.
Though, the main problem with swing trading is the degree of patience required when holding out for long period of times. Often resulting in the trader closing their positions too early and not having the ability to allow the positions to reach their final targets.
Which type of trading do you prefer?
An Introduction To Trading Inside Bar SignalsToday’s lesson is an introduction to the inside bar signal and how to trade it. It’s really one of my favorite patterns to trade, especially on the daily chart time frame. Why, you ask?
It’s simple. The inside bar pattern shows a pause or indecision in the market, and depending on the surrounding price context it formed within, this provides us with an extremely valuable clue about what a market is about to do next.
The inside bar is yet another “tool” in your price action toolbox that will add to your trading strategy which when mastered will help improve your chances of long-term trading success.
Let’s get started with some introductory concepts and theory on inside bars…
What is An Inside Bar?
An inside bar pattern is a multi-bar pattern that consists of a “mother bar” which is the first bar in the pattern, followed by the inside bar. An inside bar pattern can sometimes have multiple inside bars within the same mother bar.
Here is what standard inside bars look like:
As you can see by the image below, inside bars can form exactly in the middle of the mother bar or close to either the high or low, there is not an EXACT way they have to look, just as long as they are contained within high to low distance of the mother bar
4 Variations of Standard Inside Bars
1. Double (multi) inside bar
The “double inside bar” consists of two inside bars within the structure of the mother bar. They are pretty common and often times you will even see 3, 4 or sometimes (rarer) even more inside bars within the same mother bar structure. These patterns signify a prolonged period of indecision in the market and they can come before very powerful breakout moves…
2. Coiling Inside Bars
Coiling inside bar patterns occur when 2 or more inside bars are “coiling” up tighter and tighter like a spring, within one another. Pay special attention when you see these because they mean the market is contracting and just like a spring wound up tighter and tighter, eventually it’s going to “release” and explode into a powerful move (in many cases).
3. Fakey Pattern (inside bar false-break )
The fakey trading pattern is very important in regards to inside bars because there is an inside bar pattern within a fakey. As you can see below, a fakey is actually a false break out from an inside bar pattern. It’s literally where price initially breaks one way from an inside bar pattern, but then quickly reverses, sucking everyone out who was wrong and then charging back the other direction. Obviously, these are giving us VERY intelligent clues as to the next potential direction in price.
4. Inside Bar Pin Bar Combo Pattern
As we all know, pin bars are one of the best price patterns you can trade and when it’s when you get a pin bar that is also an inside bar, that you have an inside bar pin bar combo pattern.
When you combine a pin bar into an inside bar, you are getting both a “wind-up” that is going to be released and a pin bar with a tail / shadow that indicates the next potential direction of the market. Hence, an inside bar is not just a pause in the market, it’s a pause with an extra piece of confluence behind it, and as a result, a more powerful price action signal.
Trading Inside Bar Patterns
There are essentially two main ways we can look to trade inside bars, as with most other patterns; as a continuation signal or as a reversal pattern.
Now, I prefer to trade them as continuation signals in trending markets on the daily chart, because that’s the easiest way to trade them quite frankly. However, inside bars CAN indeed be very powerful at major support and resistance levels as reversals. Let’s look at some examples:
1. Trading Inside Bars as Continuation Move s
The “classic” way to trade an inside bar pattern, and the way that I love trading them the most, is within a trending market, as a continuation move.
An inside bar is much easier to take in a trending market because the odds are already in your favor for trading with the trend. The inside bar will many times lead to a breakout or continuation in-line with the existing trend direction. They can provide a good structure to try to pyramid your trade into a huge win.
Tip : Avoid trading inside bars at major levels until the level has cleared, because many times such inside bars will create a false break at the major level.
2. Trading Inside Bars as “Stall Patterns” / Reversals
Sometimes, you can trade an inside bar as a reversal / stall pattern where price “stalls” out at a level and that leads to a reversal back the other direction.
In the chart below, we can see an example of a good inside bar reversal signal. Notice that the inside bar formed at a key chart level, indicating the market was hesitating and “unsure” if it wanted to move any higher. We can see a strong downside move occurred as price broke down past the inside bar’s mother bar low..
Please note that trading inside bars as reversal patterns should ONLY be tried after you have successfully mastered trading them in-line with the daily chart trend as continuation / breakout plays, as we discussed above.
Special Inside Bar Trading Tip s
Here are some of my tips and tricks when trading inside bars. These are things that I learned over the years that will improve your chances of success when trading this pattern:
1. Tighter inside bar patterns and coiling inside bar patterns often lead to explosive large break out moves. This is because of the “stored energy” that took place as the market “coiled”, that energy typically gets released in the form of a strong breakout move…
2. Patterns containing smaller inside bar patterns allow tighter stop losses and great risk reward, these are the ideal candidates.
3. Be wary of patterns with both very large mother bars and large inside bars, these can often be difficult to trade due to lots of false signals and they make it more difficult to manage risk.
4. My favorite 2 patterns are – Fakey signals and – Inside bar pin bar combos.
5. We must learn to filter inside bars because the one bad thing about them is that a lot of them form across all time frames. However, with proper training and experience on the charts, you will learn to differentiate.
CONCLUSION
This was a basic introduction to the inside bar signal and how I trade it, I cover this pattern and much more in my advanced price action trading courses. Upon joining, some of what you will learn is:
1. More inside bar variations and how to trade them.
2. More example charts.
3. Members trading discussion forum, including inside bar discussion
4. Daily members on-going daily and weekly market commentary where we discuss potential inside bar trade setups as they form.
5. Members trading videos and articles library that includes more in-depth inside bar trading training.
6. Email coaching & Support line.
7. On-going updates for free
I hope you found today’s lesson helpful and inspiring. Inside bars are truly one of the most interesting and powerful price action signals so I hope you enjoyed learning about them and that you’ll continue to do so.
Please Leave A Comment Below With Your Thoughts On This Lesson…
If You Have Any Questions, You can drop your question as comment or message me privately.
How to place stop loss like a Pro TraderStop loss placement is perhaps not the most glamorous of trading topics to discuss, but it is a critically important one. If you do not know how to properly place your stop loss, you will be in for a very, very rough ride as you trade the markets. Essentially, for a trader, everything hinges on proper stop loss placement and risk management. If you understand these two aspects of trading and how to approach them properly, making consistent money in the market will become much, much easier for you.
Note : This lesson is based on higher time frame charts and the concepts are not applicable to very low time frames which is a different world of trading and not something I do or recommend so I can’t comment on it.
The theory behind placing stop losses like a pro trader
The first thing to understand and drill into your head about stop loss placement is that you should NEVER place a stop loss based on some random amount of pips. I know a lot of traders do this because I get emails from traders telling me they use “20 pip stops” or “50 pip stops”, etc. etc. This is NOT proper stop loss placement and it is definitely NOT how professional traders place their stop losses…
A stop loss should typically be based on a level in the market. Price should have to breach a level to ‘prove’ your trade wrong. You want to see price invalidate your view by giving you fact-based evidence you are wrong, that evidence comes in the form of the most logical nearby level of support or resistance being breached.
You need to take into account the context of the market you are trading and determine what level price would have to break through before your original view doesn’t make technical sense anymore. Let’s take a look at two examples to make this clearer…
The first example below shows a random pip amount stop loss placement, the second example shows a stop loss placed within the context of the market and nearby levels. Make note of the end results of both trades…
Notice in the chart below the trader placed his stop loss at an arbitrary 50 pip distance from entry. Traders typically do this because they don’t understand how to place stops properly and also because they want to trade a bigger position size. This is wrong. You need a logic / chart-based reason to place a stop loss, not just a random pip distance or a pip distance that will allow you to trade the size you want. Notice this trader would have been stopped out for a loss just before the market shot higher, without them on board…
In the next chart, we can see how this trade worked out for the trader who knew how to place stops properly / like a pro and who wasn’t placing his stop arbitrarily or based on greed (to trade a bigger size). Notice the stop loss was placed beyond the key support level and beyond the pin bar low, giving the trade good space to work out but also being placed at a point that would logically invalidate the trade if price moved beyond it….
Let’s briefly go over typical stop loss placement on two price action setups I teach; the pin bar signal and the inside bar signal . You will notice, I used a risk reward ratio of 2 to 1 on each trade, this is my ‘default’ risk reward. In other words, I always start any trade by seeing if a 2 to 1 (or more) risk reward is realistically possible given the market structure and context the pattern formed within. For expanded examples, you can reach out to me for my lesson on how to place stops and targets like a pro .
Note: Be aware of the average volatility over the last 7 to 10 days of the market you’re trading. You want your stop at least half of ATR (average true range) if not more or you will get stopped out due to noise.
The Average True Range is a tool we can use to see average market volatility over XYZ days. It is a good tool to utilize for stop loss placement when no nearby key levels are present. To learn how to apply and use the ATR tool more in-depth, you can reach out to me for my article on the average true range.
The example below shows how to use the ATR for stop loss placement and how it can keep you in a trade despite initial choppy conditions after the pattern…
IMPORTANT STOP LOSS PLACEMENT TIPS
It’s important to consider reward or target potential before taking any trade. You base the potential target of a trade on the stop loss distance. If the stop has to be too wide in order for the trade to have enough space to potentially work out, and the risk reward potential doesn’t stack up, then it’s usually not the best idea to take the trade.
Risk reward and position sizing are intimately related to stop loss placement obviously, and crucial topics in their own right. But, we are focusing here in this lesson just on stops, be aware that stops are paramount and take precedence over targets, in a way, stops are a qualifier for the target and overall risk reward and will effectively help you filter trades you should take and should not.
It is important to note that stops should always remain constant and can’t be widened, however targets can be widened, stops should only ever be tightened and moved into break even and trailed, make sure that’s concrete in your trading plan.
Stops are crucial to managing risk because once we find the stop loss placement we can then determine our position size on the trade and then we know ahead of time the cost and risks of the trade. As part of our trading business plan, stops are a cost of doing business as a trader, they are also there to force us to get out if we are wrong on a trade, despite our emotional bias towards staying in a trade, which in the end can cost us dearly if we were to hang onto a loser until we blew out our account balance.
CONCLUSION
A properly placed stop loss is truly the starting point of a successful trade. It allows us to proceed with calculating reward targets on trades and position size, effectively allowing us to execute our predetermined trading edge with a clear mental state and discipline. Traders who do not focus on stop loss placement first or put a lot of importance on doing it right, are doomed to fail and blow out their accounts.
I hope today’s lesson has given you a little ‘snapshot’ into how I approach stop loss placement. My trading course and members’ area will further educate you on how I place stop losses and how I incorporate stop loss placement into my overall trading strategy. To learn more, you can reach out to me privately.
Set and Forget TradingThe Psychological Advantages of Set and Forget Trading Regimes
Set and forget trading is a phrase that I coined in about a year back while taking classes with my students. It’s a trading approach that works if you follow it, to put it simply. For this reason, I write about it often, and my students no doubt understand the main benefits of the set and forget trading approach.
However, in today’s lesson, I want to focus on the psychological aspects and benefits of the set and forget approach and why it will help your trading performance, based on my personal experiences.
I get many of my students who email me regularly with success stories after they have adopted the set and forget approach. Hopefully, more of you will start trialing this concept because there is nothing that makes me happier than hearing my students’ success stories.
Set and forget trading works partially because of the way it helps you to systemize the entry, stop and target of your trades. By allowing the edge to play out uninterrupted, without you fiddling with it for arbitrary reasons, your long-term trading performance will improve simply as a ‘side-effect’.
However, there are also some very important mental benefits of set and forget trading which I don’t often discuss.
In this lesson, I want to focus on the psychological benefits of set and forget trading to help more of you make the mental transition to this style of trading. By committing to the trade completely before you even place it, it means you’re identifying the trade, placing the orders and walking away with very little monitoring. It also means being at peace and avoiding the emotional ups and downs that come with watching your trades as they are live. It means walking away and letting the market ‘do the work’ whilst you go do something more productive or fun. It means removing yourself from the temptations of chart-watching and getting influenced by chart whipsaws from news releases, short-term volatility and so on. In short, it means setting and forgetting!
Mental advantages…
By understanding the mental advantages of set and forget trading, perhaps you will gain a deeper understanding of its power and begin trading this way sooner.
Significantly Reduce Stress & Emotional Ups & Downs
Trading can be as stressful or as stress-free as you want it to be, it all depends on what you do. If you sit there staring at the charts all night when you should be asleep, you are doing to drive-up your body’s stress response and your cortisol (stress hormone) levels will sky-rocket both from the lack of sleep and from over-thinking about your trades .
Now, as if the stress wasn’t bad enough, it’s going to get worse. You’re also going to hurt your trading performance by doing what I described above, this will work to further increase your stress levels. Eventually, you will be tired, angry, frustrated, on the verge of tears and left with an empty trading account.
By employing my set and forget trading approach , you can eliminate all this stress, worry and losing! Show me a set and forget trader and I will show you a stress-free trader who is on the path to trading success. There have been studies done on investors / traders and their trading performance in relation to their trading frequency, and they always show that less-involved traders do better over the long-run. Similarly, even though trading is a male-dominated arena, when women do step into it they tend to do much better on average than men. Why? Simple; they do not over-trade as much and they do not risk too much like many men do. The reason has to do with men having higher testosterone levels (a hormone that makes men take more risks and feel over-confident, things that can hurt you in trading). I have an article in which I discuss this female vs. male trading phenomena more in-depth, you can write to me to send you the article if you would like to get it: What is The Weakest Link in Your Trading? Suffice it to say, us men are not always right, and we can and should learn from women sometimes and trading seems to be one area where we can benefit from their seemingly innate ability to set and forget their trades.
Help Cure Your Obsessive Chart-Watching
Have you ever heard of positive reinforcement? It’s when you get a reward from doing the right thing, this will then reinforce whatever the ‘right thing’ was that you did so that hopefully you keep doing it. It works on kids and it can work on adults too, especially in trading.
When you watch charts all the time, you are probably going to lose money, so the chart-watching is a negative behavior. The tricky part here is that the act of chart-watching can feel very good while you’re doing it (dopamine – the chemical in your brain that gives you the rush you get from the ‘hope’ of making money), so you are essentially getting a mental reward from committing a negative behavior and you are reinforcing a negative behavior by continuing to do this. Therefore, traders get stuck in an addictive cycle of watching charts, making the same mistakes over and over and losing money.
But, YOU CAN STOP THIS and YOU CAN REVERSE IT! By utilizing set and forget trading you can literally begin to reinforce positive behavior rather than negative. This will work like a positive feedback loop in which the improved performance you see from behaving properly in the markets works to make you want to continue that positive behavior. It’s no different than someone who sticks to a regime of exercise over a period of months; soon enough the endorphins and improved strength and energy-levels begin to reinforce the behavior of working out consistently. Yes, in the beginning it may seem like a ‘boring’ chore you don’t want to do and it may even hurt a little, but rest assured, that pain is good for you.
Setting and forgetting your trades is truly the key to eliminating almost every negative trading behavior that traders have. You need to implement this sooner than later.
A man smarter than me once said; “Suffer the pain of discipline or suffer the pain of regret”. That means, pay your dues, be disciplined now and it will pay off later, or you can continue to act lazy and undisciplined and you will suffer the pain of regret later.
Sleep at Night – Know What You Stand to Lose or Make
Sleep is critical to all physical and mental process in the human body. There are thousands of studies on this. I can tell you for a 100% iron-clad fact that IF you are losing sleep from watching charts and worrying about losing too much or not winning enough, you are hurting your trading performance and you are starting down the road to reinforcing negative trading habits as we discussed in point 2.
When you are using set and forget trading, your stop loss and profit targets are pre-defined, so you know what you stand to lose and what you stand to win on any given trade. I can tell you from experience, this makes it a lot easier to get and stay asleep at night so don’t under-estimate this benefit!
This brings up another point: When you know what you stand to lose or win on a trade it goes a long way towards eliminating greedy behavior. Greed is a huge reason traders fail. It causes them to hold trades too long whether the trade is moving in their favor or against them. How many times have you been in a big winning trade and you didn’t take the profit because you had no profit target or because you moved your profit target from its initial setting? This is greed. Being greedy inevitably causes traders to end up with no money.
Bulls make money, bears make money, Pigs? Pigs get slaughtered! That is one of the oldest Wall Street sayings and it rings louder than perhaps any other, still to this day.
When you set a profit target and stick to it, you aren’t being greedy, so over-time you should end up making money. When you set a stop loss and stick to it, you can pre-define your risk to a dollar amount you’re mentally OK with (potentially) losing. When you adjust your risk properly and you know what you can lose, you should have no problem setting your trade and walking away.
Disclaimer : There is never a 100% certain outcome for any trade and losses can sometimes exceed stop losses due to slippage.
Exercise the Mental Muscles of Routine & Discipline
When you make the commitment to start set and forget trading, you are kicking off a process that is self-reinforcing and will continue to strengthen the longer you use it. The power of routine and discipline, of repeating an effective system or process and staying accountable to THAT, will help you accelerate your development of the proper trading habits .
Once you have the proper trading habits in place you will see improved trading performance which gives rise to a huge surge of trading confidence in both yourself and what you’re doing. This reinforces the routine you started with and it all stems from committing to the set and forget trading approach.
Here is what this looks like in the diagram below. Notice that set and forget is in the center, because it really all starts with that idea – once you commit you will quickly figure out the proper trading routine from the help of my articles and trading courses , then it really starts to almost ‘take care of itself’ as long as you stay disciplined and stick to the set and forget plan.
The set and forget ‘wheel’ of trading success:
Confidence Through Achieving Better Trading Results
Confidence in business, trading or even in your personal life is something that truly is so important that it has no dollar value; it is invaluable. Confidence breeds more confidence and it works to reinforce those positive trading habits we discussed earlier. By trading properly not only are you reinforcing positive trading habits but you’re breeding confidence in yourself and your ability to stick to a plan, this confidence helps you stick to what was working. It’s all a positive feedback loop as I said before.
Confidence is spawned by the momentum of winning trades or at the very least, having better trading experiences and having more control over the capital in your account; the strategic planning that set and forget allows, that results in improved results. It’s not going to happen all at once, but over time, when you master this style of trading , you will start to feel more in control because you’re controlling the things you can and not trying to control the things you can’t (the market’s movement is uncontrollable).
Being more confident will spawn more motivation to continue mastering the act of finding the trade and placing the trade. It’s just like the earlier example I gave of exercise; when you get over the initial ‘pain’ of it or the initial ‘I don’t want to do this feeling’ and you start seeing positive results, it’s going to inject you with a whole boat-load of motivation and confidence that will work to fuel your on-going progress and quest for being the best. This will give you the willpower and discipline you need to make it as a trader.
Conclusion
I focus on the set and forget approach and 95% of the time I will resign to the fact I’m about to lose XYZ or make XYZ on a trade; this works to eliminate the potential of making emotional mistakes. The expectancy of my trading method combined with the set and forget money management approach has helped me, as well as many of my students improve their trading. It’s not an exact science, and of course there will be times trades are adjusted and there are times that no amount of mechanical money management can override the natural human emotion of trading, but we are not after perfection, we are after training and exercising the mind to be able to let go of the need to control the outcomes and control the market, after all the market is going to do what it’s going to do with or without us watching it or trading it. All we can do is control ourselves and our own behaviors in the market and that is what set and forget trading is all about.
Happy trading, CryptoKings!
Do well to follow for more lessons and trading analysis....
Why the Quality of your trades matters more than the QuantityMost traders simply want to trade. They fear missing out on the next big move and they forget that the market is still going to be there tomorrow and the next day and 10, 20, 50 years into the future. Everything in the market repeats and that means there will be another opportunity right around the corner, so stop worrying.
Today is not the last day you will have to trade and yet many people trade and think like it is! Over-trading is the number one reason that most traders don’t succeed; it’s a ‘cancer’ to your trading account and to your dreams.
What would be considering "over-trading?"
If you find you are almost always in a trade, you’re over-trading. If you find that you are preoccupied with the markets and your trades, you’re over-trading or you’re about to over-trade. If you are in more than one trade at a time you’re probably over-trading unless you have carefully divided up your overall 1R risk amongst all the trades.
There are many other examples of over-trading, but the basic fact of the matter is that you know if you’re trading too much because you won’t be able to sleep at night and you will be hemorrhaging money.
I personally only trade 1 to 6 times per month approximately, which all my students clearly know about that, and I very carefully select my trades and filter out the signals I don’t like.
A. Here’s what over-trading does to your trading results and account…
1. Too many trades dilute your edges
The more trades you take, the more diluted your trading edge becomes. A trading edge increases your chances of success, but the simple fact is, there are only going to be so many high-probability trade signals each week, month, year etc. no matter what your edge is.
So, once you start breaking away from your trading edge and start taking lower-quality trades that don’t meet your criteria, you start lowering your chances of success. You are basically diluting your trading edge down to where eventually it will be no better than random or worse.
basically diluting your trading edge down to where eventually it will be no better than
random or worse.
Market Noise vs Quality Trades – There is market noise, and then there are actual high-probability price events, you must know the difference. I wrote an article that touches on this titled how to trade sideways markets and I suggest you check it out to learn more and see some chart examples. The point here is that when you don’t know the difference between market noise and actual price action signals worth risking money on, you will naturally end up taking trades that are just noise and not actual signals, further diluting any edge you may have. The verdict is clear: Before you start risking your hard-earned money in the markets, make damn sure you know EXACTLY what your trading edge looks like and how to trade it so that you don’t ACCIDENTALLY end up over trading.
2. The spread and commission eats your profit
How do you think casinos make sooooo much money? Frequency. The high-frequency of games played means that their edge is going to play out to their advantage over and over again. The house always wins. In trading, the broker is the house, and they always win because not only are there a lot of people trading but probably 90% of them are trading WAY TOO MUCH. Hence, your only REAL “edge” as a retail trader or investor is to simply TRADE LESS!
Consider this : Every 100 trades you give back at least 100 to 150 pips equivalent in spread or commissions, so the more you trade the more you cost yourself simply due to the “churn” of your account.You want to avoid trading like you’re the casino player and premeditate, filter, and carefully select your trades. In a nutshell, to maintain your edge you want to avoid giving the market or broker the spread constantly.
Doing too much of anything is a bad idea
If you take a look at most endeavors, trading included, often times doing them too much or thinking too much / worrying too much about XYZ endeavor has a direct and negative relationship to how well you do at that thing.
For example : Drinking too much coke, eating too much Mcdonald’s, even working out too much or drinking too much water – all of these things can be bad for you. Being too worried about your significant other will end up pushing them away as it becomes unattractive and “needy”. One thing is true – too much of anything can hurt or even kill you and too many trades WILL kill your trading account for sure!
Your brain is wired to get addicted…
Drugs, sugar, video games, gambling, blue light from your smartphone, trading, what do all of these things have in common? They can all become insanely, dangerously addictive.
Our brains are wired and designed to become addicted to things, this is an evolutionary trait that served us well thousands of years ago as hunter-gatherers, but in modern-day society with all of its unhealthy vices and temptations, it tends to work against us and in certain cases, even kills us.
Our brains work on a reward system; when something feels good we get a little “shot” of “feel-good chemicals” such as dopamine and others. Hence, we become addicted to whatever gave us that dopamine rush, whether it was bad or good for us. For example, drugs are obviously bad for you but they can make you feel really good and we can become addicted to that good feeling even though we know the dire consequences it brings. Certain drugs like heroin are extremely addictive and can kill you very quickly, so they are especially dangerous. On the contrary, exercise also releases “feel-good” chemicals and you can become addicted to that feeling and you will be more likely to continue working out, obviously that is not a bad thing.
Knowing this basic information about how your brain works, it should be obvious that you need to be very careful and train yourself to get addicted to positive thoughts and processes so that you don’t become addicted to the negative ones.
When it comes to trading, we have a laptop in front of us with flashing colors and prices moving up or down that we can use to enter trades at the push of a button. Once we do that and hit a few winners, the brain says “hey that feels pretty damn good, do it again”, and so the trading addiction begins, if we aren’t careful.
If you do not create a trading plan where you plan out your trading edge and how you will behave in the market, you will naturally end up over-trading as you will get addicted to the feeling of “chasing” that winner. If you do not objectively plan our your trades in the beginning of your career, you will end up losing a lot of money due to trading addiction before you finally learn the lesson enough times that you either quit or have no money or desire left to trade with.
B . A CURE FOR OVER-TRADING
I’ve been trading the markets for about 2 years, teaching traders for over half that time, and without a doubt I have learned every lesson there is to learn in the markets many times over. So, the plan I am going to lay out for you below is born out of my experience and it is my opinion that if you follow it, you will be “cured” of the over-trading “cancer” that is probably destroying your trading account right now.
1. Set a max 10 to 12 trades a month, ideally less.
You must have some rigid rules built into your trading plan. Think of it like this: some of your trading strategy is rigid and then within that rigid structure there is some flexibility such as how much you risk, how you enter, where you place your stop loss, etc. But, when it comes to trade frequency, it really is necessary to say, “I am not going to take more than 10 trades a month” or 5 trades or whatever. Ideally, I would not trade more than 5 – 7 times a month. If you’re trading more than 10 times a month you’re probably over-trading.
2. Wait for setups matching your plan and apply a filter
When we talk about “applying a filter”, I am talking about a set of criteria that you use to check if a trade is worth taking or not. I like to use a T.L.S. filter wherein I am checking for a trade that has multiple pieces of confluence in its favor, at least 2 of 3: Trend, Level, Signal, etc.
Your goal is to trade like a sniper and wait patiently like a crocodile hunting its prey. You are not going to go after “every” target or the prey that looks strong and difficult to “kill”. Instead, you want to improve your odds of success by saving your “ammo” (trading capital) for the weaker / easier to get prey / trades. You only have so much money to risk just like a sniper only has so many bullets and a crocodile only has so much energy. Use it wisely or you’ll run out / blow out your account.
3. Set and forget approach
One of the big reasons traders trade too much is because they don’t give their trades enough time to play out and then they jump into another trade right away. Remember, good trades take time to play out and if you want to catch big market moves you have to be patient, this means you also have to not trade a lot. This is one reason why you need to set and forget your trades. Doing so not only improves your chances of making big gains but prevents you from trading too much and “chasing” trades.
4. Limit yourself to markets clearly moving in one direction with technical evidence
Traders often make the mistake of trading in choppy market conditions, this causes them to get in a trade and it immediately starts going against them, then they want to enter another one. The dopamine chase is underway at that point. Jumping from trade to trade is very dangerous. If you stick to markets that are clearly trending and moving in one direction aggressively, you are much less likely to over-trade.
CONCLUSION
One of the hard truths of trading is that there simply are not a large amount of highprobability price events in the market each week, month or year. So, it goes to reason that the more you trade the less impactful your trading edge becomes. Despite these facts, most traders continuously trade far too frequently each week, and they end up losing money.
My strategy is built on a low frequency trading approach so that I am basically trading as infrequently as possible whilst not passing up the most obvious trade setups. Obviously, there is some learning and skill required to know what constitutes the “best” and “obvious trade setups”, you aren’t going to just wake up one morning and magically know what to look for. With the help of my professional trading classes and the set and forget approach that I teach, you will begin to learn what a “high-quality” price action event looks like and you’ll learn to filter out the lower-quality ones from them. My end of day trading approach is inherently low-frequency FOR A REASON; it results in a selffulfilling type of function that works to systematically prevent over-trading which naturally increases your chances of long-term trading success. Which is what we all want, right?
Happy trading, CryptoKings!
Do well to follow for more lessons and trading analysis.... Love you all.
What Is Swing Trading and what are its advantages ?📊 What Is Swing Trading? 📊
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Swing trading is a style of trading that attempts to capture short- to medium-term gains in a stock (or any financial instrument) over a period of a few days to several weeks. Swing traders primarily use technical analysis to look for trading opportunities. These traders may utilize fundamental analysis in addition to analyzing price trends and patterns.
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📊 Advantages of Swing Trading 📊
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🔴 It allows you to take advantage of the natural ebb and flow of markets. Financial markets never go in one direction forever, and by being able to take advantage of that, you can increase your returns as you in theory are going to be making money when the market rises over the next few days, and then make some when the market pulls back, as it will certainly do sooner or later.
🔴 By being in and out of the markets, you can identify more opportunities. If you look at any financial chart, you can see that there is almost always a definite long-term trend, but the market might not always be at a support or resistance area. By being in and out of the market in a matter of a few days, (typically) you can collect profits, and identify other markets that are setting up for other trades. This allows you to spread the risk around, and ties up a lot less capital instead of constantly having to come up with margin for new positions as you find new trades. By closing your first position, you will not have to deposit more money in your account to cover the second one.
🔴 Stop losses are typically smaller than longer term trades. The stop losses on a swing trade might be 100 pips based upon a 4 hour chart, while a stop loss on a weekly chart that is based upon the overall trend might have to be 400 pips. This allows for you to place larger sized positions instead of extremely low leveraged ones via the longer-term trends.
Why SWING trading is the best in my opinion!Feel free to follow me on tradingview for daily analysis!
Let me know if you agree with me or disagree this is just personal preference I think swing trading is the best you can do if you're very patient.
Thank you for reading make sure to drop a LIKE if u enjoy this type of content!
The reason why trading IS gambling (Why it's important)Hello everybody and welcome,
First of all, thank you for the interest you show.
The goal of this content, is to empower you with the tools you need to shift your psychology and level up your trading.
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Before we start, let me just say that I do not have any product to sell. My content is free and my only goal is to provide valuable information to help traders being more successful and consistent when trading.
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Some explanation regarding the introduction above :
What I want to emphasize through that example, is that often times, when trading, you will face losing streaks . It is inevitable and we can also assume that it is recurrent . It is important to note what happens in the mind of a trader : doubt .
Why ? Because of not accepting the fact that trading is gambling.
I know ... It might be hard to "accept" because people often times think that trading is all about skills, but it is not.
Let me explain :
When you trade, whether you are long or short, you rely on nothing else than other people to make profits. The problem is, you do not know if these people have the same convictions and beliefs as you do regarding what the market is going to do in the future.
So there's randomness involved in trading because every moment is unique, i.e. it involves different people.
But, if you have an edge, meaning a "strategy" that puts the odds in your favor (whatever it might be, trading pullbacks, momentum trading, morning panics, gap strategies, etc...) : YOU ARE THE HOUSE . You win over a LONG period of time no matter the outcome on a trade-to-trade basis.
Now, considering what we just said, should we care about what is going to happens to the trade I highlighted above ? Absolutely not. Why ? Because we have accepted the fact that the distribution between wins and losses is RANDOM in the market . Therefore, whatever the outcome is, we know, that we will be profitable in the long run.
Why does that actually matter ?
Well, it matters, because as I stated above, traders doubt when they encounter a losing streak. They question their edges, their skills, they start questioning their rules and strategies. What is likely to happen ? They blow their account.
Fear, the biggest enemy in trading
Apart from doubt, the trader that just has gone through 4,5,6,7 or more losses in a row, is afraid. He is afraid to put on that next trade, even though that trade could be a homerun and wipe all his losses.
Fear paralyzes us, it reduces our focus and narrows our attention to what we fear the most.
You probably recall the time when you put on a trade and you kept bagholding a loser, you were paralyzed, you just couldn't sell. There's a funny thing that happens everytime when you hold on to a loser, whenever you decide to sell, the market bounces back. This is because you are not alone on that boat and human psychology is universal.
Once you have accepted that, you will be able to focus 100% on your actual trading errors, which are related to your knowledge and your skills. You will never doubt or have a moment of indecision if your edge appear on the chart. You will take the trade and don't care at all what happens next, because you know that trying to figure out if it's going to work or not has no sense.
Thank you for taking the time to read me. I really appreciate that.
Make sure you comment below if you have questions or just wanna add something.
Thanks a lot,
MyTradingJournal