Becoming a successful forex trader doesn’t come easily for the majority of us. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it and
Achieving your Trading Goals
making a million dollars. Successful trading requires focus, dedication, commitment, finding or developing the right trading strategies and trading plans, and most of all … discipline, discipline, discipline!
It can be a hard road with many ups and downs. If you don’t have your mind set to a clear destination with your trading, and constantly assess where you’re up to on your path to that destination, then you may end up going in circles or even backwards.
Setting your mind to a clear destination should involve some decisions:
- Decide why you are trading. Is it just for the money? Do you enjoy the challenge? Do you enjoy the technical aspects or analyzing fundamentals, or other things about it? * What exactly, you do hope to achieve from trading? If you are trading for the money, then decide how much money you hope to make from it. For instance, determine a monthly amount of income that you would hope to draw from trading, then work out how big a trading account you would need, and how much return on investment (ROI) you’d need to be making to achieve your desired income.
- Decide on how soon you would like to accomplish these things. A 12 month plan is generally a decent period of time to be able to gain some momentum and achieve some fairly incredible goals. It’s also not too far in the future that you think is so far away that it’s not even worth shooting for.
- Decide on a plan to get to your destination. Do you need more trading education? Do you need to find one or more profitable trading strategies? Do you need to improve your discipline?
Once you have a plan in place to reach your trading destination, take some action! Take action every single day, some sort of action that moves you toward your goal and not away from it. Each day review your goal and think to yourself: “what can I do today that will move me toward that trading goal?”. Pretty soon your actions will become habitual and you’ll automatically be well on your way to great success when it comes to trading.
It’s also important to track your progress as you move toward your trading goals. Constantly review the trades you take: did you stick to your trading rules? If you’re sticking to your trading rules and you’re still losing, then perhaps it’s time to find a new strategy, one that’s more profitable in the long run. Also track things that you normally wouldn’t think of, things like: what currencies do you trade which are most profitable for you? Which time frames on the charts do you have the most success with? What days of the week are you making the most money on?
Trade on Track makes analyzing the performance of these different attributes of your trading very simple. The program can highlight areas of strength and weakness in your trading which you would never have thought of otherwise.
The path to trading success is not an easy one – but you can fast track it and simplify it by setting achievable (but BIG) goals, taking action every day to move you toward those goals, and tracking your progress every step of the way.
Good luck and Trade Seriously!
Mark Thomas
www.tradeontrack.com
