Traders, particularly novice and intermediate level traders, always prefer to claim that they work hard. They like to project the image of being extremely busy, that they’re always on message and have to be ready to act on every micro move their chosen market makes, during the approximate 24 hours and five days a week the Forex markets is open.
In part this may be true; many of us experienced traders remember the times, during our early career as retail traders, when we’d spend hours looking at charts for clues as to where the market may be headed, or for opportunities to suddenly manually enter the market, based on a slight technical move.
The time spent researching the market leading to our decision, may take time, but actually pulling the trigger (as a market order), takes seconds. Therefore we have a lot of time on our hands, so how can we spend it wisely, whilst ensuring that we’re still on message and in a position to ensure we never miss out on a trading opportunity? What education can we possibly immerse ourselves in, during trading hours when we’re not actually trading, to potentially make us better traders?
It’s essential that we maintain our enthusiasm for trading and ensure that we stay fresh and alert to any trading opportunities that may come our way, if we become entrenched in too much irrelevant information, then we’ll easily become tired and distracted. Therefore, as part of our commitment to maintain a highly disciplined approach to trading, it’s worth making a simple list of tasks we could engage in each trading day. For example; we could visit various forums, subscribe to various trading newsletters, book mark certain economic news websites, set alarms to visit your trading platform at key times.
Trading Forums
It may be worth subscribing to a specialist trading forum to engage with others regarding ideas on strategy, money management and our overall cerebral approach to trading. You may discover posters with similar approaches and of a similar mindset. You may also discover a long standing section, or thread which covers the exact method of trading you prefer; possibly a thread on which several traders who only trade the euro (EUR/USD), using Fibonacci retracement methods.
Trading Newsletters
Why not consider setting up a separate trading email account into which you can have several trading newsletter sent to you? You’ll discover analysts whose opinion you value and begin to look forward to receiving their trading ideas.
Book Mark Economic News Sites
From Bloomberg, Reuters and the F.T. right down to other less well known, but equally revered websites, there’s a selection of economic news websites that you may enjoy visiting on a daily basis. Similar to many novice and intermediate level traders, you’ll probably discover and eventually develop a keen interest in economic news, that interest has probably been undetected for a while and may be one of the subconscious reasons you eventually discovered trading as a potential career.
Set Alarms
The ‘power’ available in a smartphone for our trading and the freedom it offers us, should not be underestimated. We can set alarms to remind us that an economic calendar release is imminent, we can set an alarm to indicate that a technical indicator reading has just been met. We can program our MetaTrader 4 platform through our desktop, to take orders when certain conditions are met, and be alerted that we’ve now entered the trade, or be given a prompt to our smartphone, in order to make the final decision.
We’ve only touched on a few ideas here, regarding how we should use our valuable free time to enhance our trading performance and identify trading opportunities. There are many other suggestions, but we’ll leave you with one key phrase, “time spent out of the market is still taking s position.” Now whilst that phrase usually relates to having no trades in the market because your conditions haven’t been met, it also relates to the fact that we’re never out of the market, as retail traders we’re always thinking, therefore it’s important that we take time to breathe, relax and potentially view our occupation from a different perspective.
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