I have really wanted to write an article on why I hate day-trading for some time now…because I actually do HATE it…Day-trading is something that everyone knows about; you could walk up to any stranger and say “what do you think about day-trading?”, and they would probably say something like “risky, but it can make you rich really fast”. Day-trading is one of the main ideas that lures people into the trading world; they think they will make some fast money and live the “dream” if they just learn how to “day-trade”. However, once they try it, most people quickly realize that it’s time intensive, stressful, and extremely difficult to make consistent money at.

I hate the façade of the stereotypical “day-trader”…

There seems to be an impression among the general public that if you’re a financial market speculator of any type you’re a “day-trader” sitting at home in front of multiple monitors making tons of frantic keystrokes and phone calls all day. Indeed, it seems more prestigious for us to tell our friends and acquaintances that we are “day-traders” during a lunch or dinner conversation…because when you tell someone you’re a day-trader they immediately get a certain image in their head. If you say “I’m a daily chart swing-trader and I trade 4 to 10 times per month”….well that just sounds a lot less glamorous doesn’t it?

This Illusion of the “day-trader” is something that appeals to many people simply because they want to say they are “day-traders”…there’s a certain perception of being some young and rich “day-trader” making millions and having a Ferrari…it ain’t reality though…

The reality of a day-trader is a guy who got 2 hours of sleep last night because he was trying to trade the overnight session, now he’s up at 6am trying to day-trade the next session. Many traders get sucked into trying to become a rich day-trader largely because that’s what they think is socially acceptable or “cool”,  and it turns into them being glued to the charts every chance they get and probably not making much money (if any). This is not a healthy way to trade and it’s definitely not a healthy way to learn how to trade.

Top down approach

As a trading educator, it makes me HATE day-trading even more when I think about all the trading websites out there promoting it and how a lot of them are geared towards beginner traders, not to mention how heavily day-trading and scalping are discussed in almost every public trading discussion forum on the internet. Day-trading is something that should only be attempted by a very experienced trader, and probably should just not be attempted at all.

You need to think of trading like building a house; first you need a foundation to build the house on, then as the house progresses you get down to finer and finer details until finally you are discussing how to decorate the interior and what type of TV to buy. As a trader, you NEED to understand how the higher time frame charts work and higher time frame price dynamics before you attempt trading the lower time frames. Trading should ALWAYS be taught and learned in a top-down technical approach, so that you understand what the higher time frames are doing before you try lower time frame trading or day-trading. This is how I teach my students in my trading courses and it’s how I have personally traded for over a decade..

Most Brokers CA$H in on day-traders (not all, but most)

Another reason why I hate day-trading is that there’s definitely a financial incentive for brokers to get people to trade more frequently. It’s very simple, more trades equals more money from spreads or commissions and that equals more money for the broker. So, there’s an underlying bias by many brokers and the greater Forex industry to get traders hooked on trading as frequently as possible. Brokers who have wider spreads make more money off you every time you trade, so they want you to trade. Thus…day-traders make a lot of money for many brokers; this is why you aren’t going to see any information about the perils of day-trading on most brokers’ websites.

It’s worth noting that not all brokers do this; some brokers have very tight spreads and don’t emphasize day-trading, and this is fairer on the trader, but most simply don’t. A Forex broker is in a position of “authority” to the unsuspecting newbie retail trader who assumes the broker well always do what’s in the best interest of their client. The point is this; be sure you choose your broker wisely.

I’ve been trading for over 10 years and I still do not “day-trade”…that should tell you something right there binary options. Again…it comes back to preserving your own capital…when you trade more frequently you give more money to your broker in spreads or commissions, leaving you with less money to trade with when you get high-probability signals in the market.

Stop-hunters love day-traders

Day traders naturally have stop losses closer to the market price since they are typically trading intra-day charts and trying to get quick gains with tight stops. The “big boys” and institutional traders love the average retail day-trader because they give them plenty of stops to “hunt”. Being a day trader and entering a lot of trades each week means it’s a lot harder to have a high winning percentage, largely because you get stopped out so much. Institutional traders have access to information on order flow and where stops are placed; it’s not only brokers who go “stop hunting” but the bigger institutional traders who can “sniff out” where the smaller intra-day traders are placing their stops. Have you ever noticed how if you try to trade intra-day the market tends to hit your stop and then reverse back in the direction of your initial position? The more day-trades you enter the greater risk you run of getting “stop-hunted” by the big boys.

Example Of Stop Hunting In Action

In the chart example below, we are looking at a 15minute USDJPY chart from earlier this week. Now, had you been trying to day-trade this 15 minute chart you probably would have talked yourself into trading all three of the pin bar setups below…

Example of How To Avoid Stop-Hunting

Now take a look at the daily USDJPY chart below…none of those 15 minute failed pin bar setups are even visible…by focusing on the daily chart you give the “stop-hunters” less prey, and you save yourself money, time and stress:

Market Noise: High-frequency and quant algorithm traders hurt retail day-traders

With the advent of high-frequency and quantitative algorithmic trading, we have intra-day charts that are full of false-signals and what I like to call “market noise”. A retail day-trader in today’s markets has a much tougher time trying to turn a profit than they did even about 10 years ago before all this high-frequency computer trading was so prevalent.  These high-frequency traders have what is essentially an “unfair” edge because they see the data that we see but a lot sooner. (you can read an article later about high frequency trading here). This type of trading has really changed the “nature” of intra-day charts from what they used to be, making them more erratic and less predictable, which obviously makes it a lot harder for the average retail day-trader to read the chart…

Note all the “noise” on this chart…it’s a 5 minute chart and is only showing about a 15 pip range…this is a very messy and difficult chart to try and trade…notice all the failed signals and “shake outs” that occurred…this type of trading will chop your account to pieces very fast

Filter out the “B.S.”

Day-trading ingrains and reinforces the “more is better” mindset which is basically gambling, instead of the “less is more” approach of swing trading the higher time frames. As we have seen, today’s retail day-trader is up against some pretty stiff competition in the form of super computers and algorithms that are programmed by math “wizards”. Why waste your time and fry your nerves trying to compete against such players with this type of unfair advantage when there is a much easier and more lucrative way to trade?

This is why I trade the 4 hour with binary brokers 24 and daily charts; they filter out all the “B.S.” that happens on the small time frames as a result of all these super-computer-math-wiz-algorithms. I guess if I really had to explain the difference between day-trading and higher time frame swing trading it would be this; work smarter, not harder. Trading on the higher time frames and ignoring all the chop and “B.S” that day-traders try to deal with is really how you trade smarter. If you want more training and instruction on how to trade “smarter” on the higher time frames, checkout my Forex trading course and members community for more info.

Let me ask you a question, and please answer yourself honestly: Do you have a plan of action for your daily trading routine or do you just open your charts and randomly start trying to find trades with no logical guidance behind your actions?

Plans give you a “roadmap” of how to go about getting what you want in life. Not having a plan for something makes it harder, it doesn’t matter what it is. Even if you are planning a family vacation that should be full of enjoyment and relaxation, if you don’t have at least a basic guide as to what you will do each day, it’s probably going to end up being confusing, semi-chaotic and highlighted by fights and disagreements rather than fun and laughter. Planning makes everything simpler and easier to accomplish, and a simple plan can put even a complex or lofty goal within reach.

Today, I am going to lay out a simple plan that you can use to improve your trading. The only “catch” with this is whether or not you have the discipline to stick to it. Most people struggle with discipline in the markets, but simplifying your daily trading routine can make it easier to stay on track and remain disciplined. So, let’s discuss the various components of this simple plan that I’ve designed for you and then next week you can get started following it and see if your trading improves.

Note: The steps below are meant as a basic trading guide or plan to help struggling or beginning traders. If you are serious about using this plan, then you should follow it for at least two or three months and then tweak it as you see fit after that.

Step 1: Trade only major markets

The first step to this simple daily trading guide is to be sure you’re only analyzing some of the major markets. I like to stick to themajor forex currency pairs as well as spot Gold, Crude Oil and Dow. Here’s the symbols for the markets that I follow the most frequently and the ones you should follow for this simple trading plan:

EURUSD, GBPUSD, AUDUSD, NZDUSD, USDCAD, USDJPY, EURJPY, GBPJPY, AUDJPY, XAUUSD, WTI, DJ30

That’s 12 markets, more than enough to focus on. If you’re in the USA and you can’t trade spot Gold, Crude or Dow then just focus on the currency pairs I’ve listed.

There really is no need to analyze 20 or 30 markets like many traders do. Besides, if something big happens that really moves the markets, it’s probably going to show up as a price action signal on one of the 12 markets I’ve listed above anyways. If you really want to simplify your daily trading routine, you should scale-back the markets you analyze so that you are just focused on a handful of major markets. The first step in this simple plan is to figure out the markets you will trade and make sure you’re not looking at more than 10 or 12 per day, the list that I use above is suitable for any currency trader to use.

Step 2: Clean up your charts and only trade daily charts

Next, it’s time to get your charts setup. Open the daily charts of the markets I’ve discussed above, or whichever 10 or 12 you want to follow. If you don’t know how to get your charts looking like mine, then read this metatrader 4 tutorial that I wrote, it will help you get all setup.

The second requirement for this simple trading plan is to only look at and trade the daily chart time frames, if you start looking at the 4 hour and 1 hour charts or below, you will have broken your discipline, and I can only vouch that this plan will work for you if you follow it to the T.

Step 3: Pick one setup to trade

This step is critical; you will only be trading one price action signal for this trading routine. Last week, I wrote an article on how to master your trading strategy, I suggest you go read that before implementing the plan I’m laying out in this article. Eventually, you can try learning different entry signals, but for the purpose of this simple trading plan I am designing for you this week, you should only trade one signal. If you start to see that you’ve stopped losing money each month and that your account is growing slowly but surely after using this plan for two or three months, then you can start implementing different entry signals. But, for now, I need you to understand that you have to narrow your focus, remove variables and reduce clutter from your mind and charts to really “turn the corner” in your trading, and the best way to start this process is learning to become a master of one setup at a time.

Step 4: Follow this money management plan

For purposes of simplicity and to show you the power of risk reward, all the trades that you take while following this plan will be set at a 1:2 risk reward. That means, your profit targets will be twice the dollar amount as your risk.

The way to place your stop loss properly is to use the surrounding market structure to figure out the most logical place to put it that gives the trade the best chance at working out but also is not too far away. What this basically means is that you should not place your stop an arbitrary level because you want to trade a certain position size…this is greed, and it will end up working against you in the end. You should have predetermined your 1R risk per trade (this is the dollar amount you risk per trade), then when you find a setup you want to trade you figure out the safest and most logical place to put the stop loss…then you adjust your position size so that you are only risking your predetermined dollar risk amount.

You will place your profit targets with the aim of getting a 2R reward on every trade; that just means two times your risk. However, in placing targets you do also need to consider the surrounding market structure; if a logical 2R reward is not realistically possible because a large key level is in the way, then you might have to reconsider taking the trade.

After you figure out the most logical stop placement you will then adjust your position size down or up to meet your predetermined dollar risk amount. If you need more help on this topic of position sizing, check out this article on risk reward and position sizing.

Step 5: Track your progress in a trading journal

The next part of this simple plan is to make sure you’re recording everything in your trading journal. If you do not have one you can get a trading journal here. Keeping a journal of all your trades is probably something that many traders forget about or that falls to the wayside after a few weeks…but you can’t let it. You NEED the track record created from keeping a journal to make trading feel more like a business and to bring more of a process into your trading routine. The actual process of entering your trades and journaling them will help to keep you disciplined because it reflects back to you your trading results. If your trading results show that you’ve made emotional trading errors like risking more than you knew you should per trade or entering stupid trades that you knew you shouldn’t have…you will see these things in your journal and hopefully you’ll stop doing them.

It’s easy to be lazy and gamble your money in the markets, but when you are forcing yourself to keep a journal of all your trades you will be a lot more aware and conscious of your behavior in the market. If your behavior is that of a gambler, you will then clearly be able to see that YOU are the problem with your trading and that you need to adopt the proper trading mindset to succeed. If your trading journal begins to show a pattern of consistency in following your risk management model and your trading strategy…it will be something you can proud of…few traders have a track record that they are confident in showing to other people or potential investors. You have to use the trading journal as a tool to reinforce positive trading habits and help eradicate negative ones, and you do this by forcing yourself to manually record your trades, think about them and analyze them.

Step 6: Follow the plan

Now, clearly the plan I’ve laid out today will not work if you don’t follow it. You need to be sure that if you commit to this plan you actually follow it. Give it at least two months, and then evaluate where you’re at. Maybe you’ve stopped losing money and are breaking even now, maybe you’ve made a nice profit each month, either way it’s an improvement over losing money each month, and that is the point of the simple plan I’ve laid out here today for you; to get you off the track of hemorrhaging money from your trading account and onto the track of slowly but surely becoming a profitable trader.

Step 7: Challenge yourself

Perhaps the best way to think about the guidelines I’ve laid out for you in today’s article, is that they are a challenge to yourself. Many people have trouble completing even the seemingly simplest tasks; reading a book from cover to cover in two weeks, getting to work on time or early each day, exercising three times a week consistently…whatever the task, it can be very hard for many people to stay focused on it long enough to see its benefits pay off. In trading, this trouble with focus and discipline is an even bigger problem than in most other things we do; because in trading your hard-earned money is on the line each day.

To end today’s lesson, I want you to do something if you’re really serious about following this simple plan that I’ve laid out here today. I want you to either print out this lesson and sign the bottom of it as a pledge that you will follow it, or write yourself a little “commitment” pledge and print it out and sign it. Hang this paper on your wall next to your trading desk or put it somewhere where you will see it each day before you trade. The first step to becoming a profitable trader is seeing if you have the discipline and patience to stick to a simple plan like this for two months. After two months, come back and leave me another comment on this article or drop me an email and tell me about your trading results. If you want to learn more about simple trading strategies that can help you dramatically improve your trading results, checkout my Price Action Trading Course here.

Money management is like the “elephant in the room” that most traders don’t want to talk about. It can be boring, embarrassing, or even emotionally painful for some traders to talk about risk and capital management, because they know they aren’t doing it right.

However, as with anything in life, talking about the “elephant in the room” is usually the best thing you can do to improve your Forex trading. This means, being honest with yourself and focusing on the “hardest” or most boring things first and as often as necessary. If you ignore these things they will typically grow into huge problems that you can no longer control.

In today’s lesson, I’m going to help you understand some of the more important aspects of managing your risk and capital as you trade the markets. This lesson will answer many questions I get from traders asking about breakeven stops, trailing stop losses, and more. So let’s get started…

Keep risk consistent

The first “secret” I’m going to tell you about is to keep your risk consistent. As Marty Schwartz said in the the market wizards article that I quoted him in, “Also, don’t increase your position size until you have doubled or tripled your capital. Most people make the mistake of increasing their bets as soon as they start making money. That is a quick way to get wiped out.”

Why do I consider this a “secret”? Well, since most traders have a tendency to increase their risk size after a winning trade or after a series of winners, this is typically something you want to avoid. Basically, doing the opposite of whatever “most traders” do can be considered a “secret” of trading…and when it comes to money management there are quite a few of these “secrets”.

I’m a strong proponent of keeping risk consistent not only because it’s how other professional traders operate, but because of lessons learned from my own personal experience as well. Earlier in my career, I was the guy cranking up my risk after a winner…and finally after realizing that this was not the right thing to do, I stopped. Also, from my observations of traders that I help, I know that many traders increase risk after a winner, and this is a big reason they lose…

After you win a few trades you have a tendency to become over-confident…and I should stress that there’s nothing inherently wrong with you if you do this or have done it; it’s actually human nature to become less risk averse after winning a trade or multiple trades. However, it is something you’ll need to put an end to if you want to make money trading the markets. If you’ve read my article about the one thing you need to know about trading, you would know that even if you’re following your trading strategy to the T, your winners and losers are still randomly distributed. This means, after a winning trade there is no logic-based reason to think the next trade will also be a winner….thus no reason to increase your risk size. But, as humans, we like to gamble….and it can be really hard to ignore the feelings of euphoria and confidence after hitting a nice winner…but you HAVE TO if you want to manage your money effectively and make a living in the market.

Withdraw profits

As we discussed above, keeping your risk consistent or “fixed” is one of the keys to successful Forex money management. Professional traders do not jack up their risk exponentially after every winner…this is not a logical or real-world way to manage your risk. Professional traders who make their living in the markets withdraw money from their accounts each month and most will keep their accounts funded to around the same level each month. If you’re withdrawing profits every month then you would not keep increasing your risk amount over time.

What you need to do is build your account up to a level your comfortable with, and then you can start withdrawing profit each month to live off of…thus the amount you risk on each trade would not keep increasing because eventually your trading capital will reach an “equilibrium” level. 

Moving a stop loss to ‘breakeven’ can kill your account

The big secret regarding breakeven stop losses is that you should not move your stop loss to breakeven unless there’s a real price-action based, logical reason to do so. Moving your stop loss to the same level that you just entered at doesn’t make sense if there’s no reason to do so. Moving to breakeven arbitrarily or because you have some pre-decided “rule” to do so is simply not an effective way to manage your trades. How many times have you moved to breakeven only to see the market come back and stop you out and then move on in your favor? You have to give your trades “room to breathe”, and if there’s no reason to tighten your stop or move to breakeven, then don’t.

What you might not realize, is that messing around with your stop loss or manually closing trades out before they’ve had a chance to move, is voluntarily reducing the ability of your trading edge to work in your favor. In short, if you don’t have a logic-based reason to move to breakeven, then you’re moving to breakeven based on emotion; mainly fear. You need to overcome your fear of losing money, because losing part of being a successful trader, and until you learn how to let a trade breathe and move without your constant interference, you will not make money.

Now, I’m not saying that you should never move to breakeven, because there certainly are times when you should. Below are some logical reasons to move your stop loss to breakeven:

• If an opposing signal causes caution and changes market conditions you can take that as a logic-based reason to move to breakeven.

• If the market approaches a key chart level and then starts to show signs of reversing, you should take that as a signal that the market might indeed reverse and then trail your stop to breakeven.

• If you’ve been in a trade over a few days and nothing is happening, you might exit the trade or move to breakeven…this is known as a “time stop”, or using the element of time to manage your trades. Generally speaking, the best trades do tend to work out in your favor soon after you enter.

• If a big news announcement like Non-Farm Payrolls is coming out and you’re up a nice profit, you might want to move to breakeven or monitor the trade. Volatile news announcements like this can often change market conditions.

Don’t be greedy: don’t aim for big targets all the time

Another “secret” of money management is that you have to actually take profits. This might not really seem like a “secret” to you, but I consider it a secret since most traders simply don’t take profits as often as they should…and many traders almost never take profits. Why do you have trouble with taking profits? It’s simple really; it’s hard to take a profit when a trade is in your favor because your natural tendency is to want to leave a trade open that’s in your favor. Whilst it is important to “let your winners run”…you have to pick and choose when you do this; you certainly should not try to let every winning trader run. The market ebbs and flows, and the majority of the time it’s not going to make a really strong directional move without retracing a lot of it. Thus, it makes much more sense as a short-term swing trader to take a solid 2 to 1 or 3 to 1 profit when the market is offering it to you…rather than waiting until the market retraces against your position and moves all the way back towards your entry point or beyond, at which point you will probably exit emotionally since you’re mad you let all that open profit go.

Especially for traders with smaller accounts, you have to be happy taking “bread and butter” rewards of 1 to 1 or 2 to 1 often….there’s nothing wrong with hitting those “singles” and “doubles” to build your trading account as well as your confidence. You have to avoid the temptation of trying to hit a “home run” on every trade.

Knowing when to let a profit run

Every now and then the market will be just ripe for a 10 bagger….a home-run trade. Whilst these trades are rare, they do indeed occur, however you have to avoid the mistake that many traders often make; aiming for a “home-run” on every trade. Most of the time, the market is only going to move a certain range each week and month. For example, the average weekly range on the EURUSD is around 250 pips.

Knowing when to try and let a trade run and when to take the more certain 1 to 1, 2 to 1 or 3 to 1 reward is really where your discretionary price action trading skill comes into play. I’ll be honest here because I do get a lot of emails asking about when to let trades run versus taking a set risk reward ratio, there’s no “concrete” rule I can give you except to say that training, screen time, and “gut” feel for reading the charts are things that you need in order to improve your skill at exiting trades.

I can however give you some simple filters that you can use to assess trades on a case by case basis to help determine whether or not they are good candidates to try and run into a bigger winner:

1. Strong breakout patterns – When the market has spent a while consolidating it will typically lead to a strong breakout up or down. These strong breakouts can often be good candidates for “home-run” trades. However, not every breakout is equal; some are weaker than others and sometimes the market makes a false break before the real breakout occurs. So, we need to exercise caution when trading breakouts, the safest ways to enter a breakout are the following two scenarios:

The chart image below shows us an example of entering the market on a price action setup in “anticipation” of a breakout. This is a more advanced way to enter a breakout but it can provide a tight stop and a very large risk reward potential on the trade. There are usually price action “clues” just before this type of breakout; note the bullish tails on the bars that preceded the inside bar setup in the chart below. This indicated that momentum was building just below resistance for a potential upside breakout, then we got the littleinside bar setup just below the breakout level that provided a nice “anticipation” entry into the market.

The chart image below shows an “anticipation” entry on a price action signal just before the breakout:

The next way to enter a breakout that could lead to the type of trade that you can let run into a bigger winner, is to wait for the market to “confirm” the breakout after a retrace back to resistance or support. Once price breaks above or below a key level it will typically come back and retest it before pushing off again in the direction of the breakout. These types of “confirmed” breakouts from key levels can also be very good opportunities to try and trail your stop to let the trade run.

The chart image below shows a price action signal that formed on a retrace back to the breakout level:

2. Obvious trend continuation signals

Strong trending markets can obviously be good candidates to try and let your trade run into a big winner. We sometimes see very large potential winners in strong trends like the GBPJPY chart below shows. Note, in this example below, the trend was clearly up and so any price action signal that formed in this strong trend would have been a good candidate for a larger gain, we can see the pin bar signal and inside bar setup in the chart below could have been very large winners for anyone who traded them.

The chart image below shows a good example of trading price action trend-continuation signals which can be good candidates for trailing your stop to let the trade grow into a bigger winner:

3. Price action signal at a key level in strong trending market

Another good scenario to look for potential “home-run” trades is after the market retraces to a key level within a trending market. In the chart below we can see a clear example of this when a fakey setup formed recently in the spot Gold market within the structure of the downtrend. We actually discussed this fakey in our February 5^th commentary and we can see the market fell significantly lower after forming that signal from resistance. When a market is clearly trending and then it retraces back to a key level and forms an obvious price action signal in-line with the underlying trend, it can often be a good opportunity to look for a larger than average winner.

The chart image below shows a fakey signal that formed after the market had retraced back to a key resistance level within the down-trending market:

The above scenarios can be good for letting your profit run. You would want to begin the trailing process by moving your stop to breakeven once the market clearly shows you that the trend is taking off in your favor. I like to wait until I am up at least 1 times my risk before moving my stop to breakeven. After that, how you trail your stop and exit the trade is something you will have to use discretion to decide; there are many different trailing techniques but none of them are “perfect”. Over time and through training and practice, you will develop a better sense for determining whether or not to trail a stop and how to do it.