Your A-game

Wake up, grab a coffee, sit at the screens and make bank!

That’s pretty much how we all think this game works in the beginning. (Guilty! I know I did when I started in ‘01) Then we get a rude awakening. Trading’s not as easy as it seems…

Firstly. We’re competing against the best traders on the planet, well-capitalised and sharp.

Secondly. We’re trying to battle with the hard-wired chimp brain that is quite possibly the worst trader you could invent!… (Impulsive, not willing to take a loss, huge ego, etc.)

A super tough endeavour. So at the very least, we must bring our A–game to the party. And our A–game is not just rolling up and clicking a mouse…

To stand a chance we’ve got to do better than that. There are many facets to our trading business we need to work on.

Placing the trades

This is the click-click. The ‘easy part’…

Researching new trade ideas

Your chart scanning, screening and general trading research. That means more than just a simple glance at your preferred time frame. Try asking questions to encourage deeper research.

Eg: “How did the Nasdaq perform historically the day after a larger than usual trend day?”

Auditing your performance

Journal and review. 

Are you missing out on a key valuable piece of information by not reviewing your trades? (A multi-year member of Traders Mastermind recently posted in the community that he was nicely profitable over the past 30 weeks, but Mondays were a losing day on average. Strip that out and he would be up much much more.)

You don’t get that data without doing some digging.

Trading business strategy

• Where are you heading?
• What type of trading business do you want to grow?
• What will you trade and how much screen time?
• Do you have ambitions to start a fund or trade with a prop firm?

This isn’t going to be something you do every day, but higher-level strategic thinking is super important.

All the small day-to-day decisions need to be aligned with the business you are building. (BTW if that business is a lifestyle upgrade then that’s cool too)

Nourishing your mind

I got on my soap box a bit last week in an email about news… So I don’t need to jump on again! But self-improvement and learning often get left to chance.

Be more intentional about your growth…

Schedule time to read books, take courses and watch videos. Sometimes you might want to gain more trading knowledge, and others some motivation and inspiration. But just like you’d allocate time and budget for employee training and upskilling, the trader in your trading business (you!) will benefit from that too.

Today, think about all the aspects of your trading business you could work on to bring your A–game.

Can you reserve time in your diary to work on other sides of the business that need attention?