Trading For a Living with confidence

Trading For a Living but low on confidence?

Trading For a Living will be difficult if you are having a problem with a fear of pulling the trigger. This is probably because you are not confident in your trading setups.

The only reason you are not confident is because you have not demo traded your strategy sufficiently with discipline, and you have no expectations of your ultimate success, or failure for that matter.

If you have not focused on trading your strategy with discipline while demo trading, and been continuously learning from both winning and losing trades you will get to the point of fear of loss.

When you demo trade with discipline and have a plan of why you will get into and out of a trade, and stick to that plan, you will have confidence to enter into the market.

“Trade your plan and plan your trade.” is a well known saying in the trading world, take this into your demo trading first.

Tips on Trading For a Living:

• Don’t over trade. Overtrading to make up for losses by the end of the trading day courses desperation and can make bad setups look good.

• Don’t increase your risk attempting to cover your losses.

• If you have a reasonable system with a positive expectancy you know you will always make it right back. Purchase a good strategy if necessary but then practice it with discipline. Don’t jump in and out of the market because you think it will go up or down. Don’t try and predict where the market is going, rather stay with your chosen method of trading.

• Don’t combine strategies. Stick to one and give yourself time to learn it properly before you say it doesn’t work. Become the VERY best at one style and one strategy of trading.

There’s one common statement that many traders make when they look back on their career. They wish that they had demo traded a lot more, and got a proper education for trading before they jumped in with real money.

These problems can be mastered once you demo trade perfectly, with excellent discipline. A lack of confidence and poor risk control can be eradicated if your practice is perfect. Thus emotion free trading can be achieved.

Price Driven Trading.

Trading For a Living using Price driven trading can be a completely mechanical system of trading which is the opposite of discretionary trading. As soon as there is money at stake, emotions are going to cloud your judgment and will hinder your performance. Your chosen system must have a set of rules which specifically define what should be done, and when to do it (entry timing and exit timing). It provides a signal when you should enter a trade and when to exit a trade.

Therefore when you enter you have your stop loss placed as well as your target or targets. You can then in essence walk away from your computer and leave the trade to work out the way it was planned.

Emotions and stress can be eliminated if you study and learn how to read the charts. No judgment or discretion is required at all and you can actually ignore all the indicators or use only one or two, as long as your entry is not subjective.

You can pretty much eliminate stress by using a mechanical system of trading.  The demons of fear and greed and panic and euphoria can be kept in check better.

I am not talking about black box trading, as these automated strategies are usually highly optimized to bring you the best back tested figures, and showing an unrealistically good performance.

You will do far better to use a good manual strategy that you forward test, through perfect demo trading. Only perfect practice makes perfect.

We are very often programmed as children to have limiting beliefs, fears, and lack of self worth and these feelings are usually brought into your trading. Deep down, traders who don’t prepare don’t feel they deserve to win. We always gravitate toward our just desserts. Therefore absolute discipline is essential to help to re-programme yourself. You can succeed!!

I cannot stress enough, how vitally important it is to be successful with your disciplined demo trading, before you go live.

This to me is the main reason for the 95% failure rate of traders.

Imagine if every beginner trader were to practice with absolute discipline until their strategy is showing a profit, and only then fund an account with the capital required. The success rate would be reversed to 95% successful.

Don’t be in a hurry to make money. Money has and never will be easy to come by. Work for your money and you will be successful.

There are many, many tutorials on the internet. If you purchase one then pay close attention to the rules of the system.  Don’t take a good system and fail with it simply because you don’t have discipline. Be smarter than the rest and learn that success in trading is all about DEMO discipline first, and money management.

Choose a simple method or technique, something that is not too time consuming and you will be successful, without too much stress, and you will still have a life.

Trading For a Living is just a lot more fun, this way!