How to make your first profitable trade
When I started my trading career I used to buy, test and try every single method I could put my hands on. Not only for trading the Forex markets, but for options, stocks, futures or any trading instrument I could find. However must of the times I was making wrong trading decisions that were hurting my trading account and my financial future.
I was too quick to enter trades and also too quick on going out of them. As soon as I was seeing a tiny small profit I would start to feel compeled to just go out of the trade, call it a day and stick to the idea of “no trader was made poor by exiting winning trades”. However when my trades were against me, which was most of the time, I was also too slow to honor my stop losses and simply was too lazy to face the fact that the market was proving me wrong.
It wasn’t really hard to see, however it required a lot of inner strength to simply say: “ok, I was wrong, move to the next and close this one”. It took me years to hone this ability.
Together with this, deceivingly simple ability, is the other, maybe as equally important ability, to just stick to your plan and let your winner go all the way to the point where you planned to exit your trade, or the point where you planned to move your stop-loss to break-even.
Move Your Emotion from -The Trade- to Actually Finding a Profitable Setup
If you are trading in any form right now, and you are not achieving the results you expect, I encourage you to simply STOP trading real funds. Open a DEMO account, scan the markets as you normally do, wait patiently for a good trade opportunity within the system you are following, and enter the market with the confidence of your stop-loss and take-profit levels.
Repeat this process over and over, not in an emotional way where you see every single dollar you are making or losing (lucky for you it will be much easier now, since they will be virtual dollars). STOP focusing on the profits and start focusing on executing your system flawlessly.
After a couple of dozen trades you will start to see how your mind starts working in a different way. You will move your emotion from the trade in itself, to the work involved on finding new trades. I myself, when trading, expect much more rush by finding the trades, seeing the setups form, because I know, that once the trade is executed, I basically do nothing and will have to wait, most of the times without looking at the markets at all, until my plan pans out and I can see the END result.
After you can execute a trade from the beginning to the end correctly you cannot say that you had a profitable trade.