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Risk disclaimer: The information presented on our blog are for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing on this website serves as investment advice or recommendations. Trading is risky and you can lose more than your initial investment. MyFxMentor cannot be held responsible for any decisions visitors make. Please consult a financial advisor before making any investment decisions. Risk disclaimer.

Lerato Masigo 6/11/19 Lerato Masigo 6/11/19

Why Trading Discipline Is The Key To Profitability

What’s wrong with deviating from your forex trading plan if you make a profit anyway?

Making an occasional winning trade, even when you throw your trading plan out the window, may provide short-term pleasure, but entering trades haphazardly can adversely influence your ability to maintain discipline in the long term.

Trading is a marathon, not a sprint!

When you stop following your trading plan, you become rewarded for lacking discipline and you may start believing that abandoning a trading plan is no big deal.

An unjustified reward may increase your tendency to abandon trading plans in the future.

You may be prone to think “I was rewarded once, maybe I will be rewarded again. I’ll take a chance.”

But the positive outcomes of undisciplined trading are usually short-lived, and a lack of discipline ultimately produces the long-term trading losses.

It’s important to distinguish justified wins from unjustified wins.

A justified win is when you create a very detailed trading plan and FOLLOW the plan. A win that results from following a trading plan is justified and reinforces discipline.

An unjustified win occurs when you make a plan but don’t follow it or if you have no plan at all. You might be rewarded, but the outcome occurred by chance.

You might as well flip a coin or hang a printed copy of your charts on the wall and throw darts at it to help you make trading decisions. The win is unjustified and can reinforce undisciplined trading.

Maintaining discipline is vital for consistent and profitable trading.

You trade proven forex trading strategies, over and over, so that across a series of trades, the strategies work enough to produce an overall profit.

It’s like making shot after shot on the basketball court so as to accumulate a winning number of points. The more shots you take, the more likely you will amass points. Just look at some of the most successful athletes in the world.

The winning player is the person who first develops the skill to make the shot consistently so that at every possible opportunity, the ball is likely to go through the basket or goal posts.

They’ve developed the skill to learn how to shoot the ball the same way every single time. Consistency is crucial!

It’s the same for trading. One must trade consistently, following a specific trading plan on each and every single trade.

If you trade one approach this time, and a different approach at another time, your performance will more than likely be haphazard.

If you follow the plan sometimes and abandon it at other times, you throw off the probabilities, and you will most likely end up losing overall.

3 Tips To Help You With Building Your Discipline

1. Remain Consistent At All Times

Don’t let unjustified wins interfere with your ability to maintain discipline.

2. Follow Your Own Trading Plan

Follow your trading plan and cement in the mindset that if you follow your plan, you will end up more profitable in the long run.

3. Have A Clearly Defined Goal

Have clearly defined goals for all your trades. Know when you will exit a trade and set your profit targets. It is very important to understand goal setting in forex trading and pairing it with a consistent risk to reward ratio.

Happy Trading

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Lerato Masigo 6/5/19 Lerato Masigo 6/5/19

THE POWER OF PATIENCE IN FOREX TRADING

Whether being a trader is your full-time job or you wish to get an additional return on your savings, investing on the FOREX market involves carefully thinking about which trading strategy you will implement based on your capital, your time horizon, your risk aversion, your money management, your psychology etc.

Whatever the case, each investor should try to answer the following question:

How can I make consistent profits with FOREX trading?

THE POWER OF PATIENCE IN FOREX TRADING

Understanding how important patience is while you start learning to trade will completely change the trajectory of your performance in the long run and help you achieve your goals faster. But before trying to figure out what your trading plan will be, you should first think about why you want to trade: What are you doing this for?

Once you know the reasons why you want to learn how to trade and you have set some goals, you need to understand that there is no quick way to make money while trading. Learning how to trade requires hard work, knowledge, discipline, commitment, dedication and above all patience.

The power of patience shouldn’t be underestimated while learning how to trade, it’s a vital characteristic a trader must have to be successful in the long-term.

Because the FOREX market is very volatile and is open 24hours, 5days a week. A lot of traders decide to use the “scalping trading” method, opening themselves up to the risk of being overexposed. Scalping is a trading strategy used to take advantage of small prices’ variations. This is one of the most aggressive trading strategies around, because traders are aiming for a lot of small quick profits.

Being patient is crucial for those traders, as without it, they are liable to overtrade.
It is not necessary to constantly be in position and believe that you must invest in every price’s movement, or that there is money to make on every single trade. Sometimes the currency pair you are working on will evolve within a sideway consolidation for a while without giving relevant signals.

You must then know how to be patient and open a position only with trades that have the most bullish or bearish potential (breakouts patterns, trend reversals signals). The ability to wait for a technical configuration, a market opportunity to present itself, or to maintain an opened trade until prices reach your goals, will all help you outperform the average trader, who trades on emotion.

Don’t worry about missing the boat and accept the fact that being on the sidelines and waiting is an essential part of trading. It’s a sign of strength and control, not a sign of failure.

You can also observe how patience is important while dealing with losses or gains. Everything is about trusting your trading plan and the strategy you decided to apply.

Observe the way you manage your winnings. It’s easy to close your position when you’re making a lot of money. Is it the right thing to do? Not necessarily, especially if your target price hasn’t been reached yet: this means that there is certainly still an upside potential according to your trading system (or downside potential if you are short).

Nearly 90% of traders take profits too early because it’s easy to do – and the same percentage of traders lose money at the end of the year because they do what is easier…

If you are too stressed and if you have trouble controlling your emotions, you’ll tend not to trust your trading plan or your analysis. You will want to close your position relatively quickly, regardless of the messages conveyed by the technical indicators or your chart analysis. Despite earning potential, you will be impatient and you will decide to close your position because you’re following your instinct and not your analysis.

Once the position is closed, you will often realize that it goes back in positive territory and ends up in the direction you had anticipated and you could have won if you were more patient.

It is therefore very important not to react impulsively to situations or let your emotions dictate your behaviour.

You can dramatically improve your chances of success in trading by simply having the patience and discipline to wait for the right opportunity and follow the trading plan you’ve worked on and back-tested.

Happy Trading

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Lerato Masigo 5/20/19 Lerato Masigo 5/20/19

8 Key Steps To Reach Your Goal!

1. First Things First

Figure out everything you think you need to do. Don’t just think – write them out. Use a mind maps, use Post-Its, use pieces of paper. Whatever you do, do not rely on your memory to keep track of things. Once you have everything, you can start to prioritise things. Pay attention to deadlines, and that don’t mean “get this task or project done first”, but give yourself information to help you plan.

2. Prioritise

A good starting point for prioritising is to check how urgent or important (is this a big deal?) the project/task is. Also, ask to whom the work is important: are you doing it for yourself or because someone else wants you to do it? This can affect how much enthusiasm & progress you give to the task.

3. Break Things Up

By breaking things up, you can really see what needs to be done to complete the overall task. You can see that there are clear things you can do and tick off, rather than seeing just an endless mountain of general work. You can record clear progress and do things in an order that will achieve the overall task, not just bits here and there.

4. Record & Review

Become aware of your habits, good and bad. See if you are making the progress you want to be. There can be many factors you may need to take into account. If you find it difficult to do creative work at your desk, find somewhere else to do it – that’s your responsibility. If social media is a distraction, then turn it off for periods of “work time”. Record how things are going. Make a note of how long a task took, and when you did it. If you notice patterns of productivity, then tailor your work plan to exploit those plans. Be honest to yourself about how you work best and also worst. This will help you get more done and be more productive.

5. Visuals Are Important

Being able to see clearly what is coming up and what you have done can be helpful. Use calendars to see when you have things going on (meetings, events) and what tasks still are in need of work. I create a separate week plan on Sunday evenings to show what tasks i aim to get done over the next week. I prefer to highlight the most important tasks to complete daily and then allocate time for other things.

6. Plan → Do → Review

It is pretty simple, make a plan of what you are going to do. Do it. Review it. What worked well? What didn’t? What could you do differently? What is your next goal? These three words work on so many levels when it comes to productivity: use them on your own goals, use them on whatever system you are using to manage things. Reviewing the success of how you are trying to do things is really important. It will also help you to see your work as a series of successes rather than focusing on what you perceive as your failures.

7. Relax

It is very important to take time out, not just at the weekends and in your evenings, but do things for yourself. Do something other than your work. Your brain and your body will thank you for it. Sometimes you have to push yourself to exhaustion or pull an all-nighter. If that is happening every day you will eventually fall apart, and your work will suffer.

8. Do Things

The main key is being productive. Getting things done. You can have fun, that’s totally fine, but don’t lose sight of the big picture. You want to get things done, as well as you can, as efficiently as you can. Find your passion and follow it.

Happy Trading

Want to join the MyFXMentor Team? See trades taken by our top trading analysts, join our live trading chatroom, and access our strategy library! Simply contact us on bookings@myfxmentor.com

// MY FAVORITE BROKERS

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