Developing your Trading Process

Developing your Trading Process

Introduction

In this final section, we are going to be putting everything you have learned together into an actionable trading plan that you can use every day in the markets. The basic principle that you need to always keep in mind is not that you should be following this rigidly step by step but rather that you should be looking to apply these principles over and over again.

The main themes of this training are as follows:

• You need a good understanding of the overall markets and not just how to trade forex specifically. The different markets that we have talked about are interrelated and are terms that you will come across almost every day in your research.
• Fundamental analysis should be the foundation of every single trade you take. The key to fundamentals is understanding the reasons behind each price move in the markets.
• Risk management should be incorporated into every single element of your trading business so that you have multiple defenses protecting you from losses at all times.
• Technical analysis should only be used as a simple method of visualizing a trade to give it structure. All technical concepts are more or less the same when it comes to their effectiveness.
• Trading psychology should be your number one focus once you have the basic 4 elements of professional FX trading understood and the skillsets learned. Working on your inner game is the key to consistent profitability. The ultimate goal for you is to be trading in the zone at all times.

Everything in this course is more than enough knowledge for you to create a trading plan that you can use to start developing and practicing your skills further. Remember, just like buying the best golf clubs will not make you good at golf, consistently hunting for more and more knowledge will not make you a better trader. You need knowledge first, practice and skill building second, followed by working on your inner game from that point on.

With all this in mind it’s time to create the trading plan so that you can move on from the knowledge building stage and on to the skill building stage. There are several things that we will be focussing on in this section but the main goal will be to build up a routine that you can follow every day no matter what the market conditions may be.

Your routine should be comprised of 4 distinct elements:

1. Knowledge phase
2. Analysis phase
3. Execution phase
4. Review phase

To make this clear and simple we will go through each one of these phases and give you the tools you will need for each one. At the end of this section we will look at the routine of a successful professional trader along with a selection of trading strategies that we use that you can also use for yourself depending on your trading style and preferences.

Finally, we will provide some print outs that you can have physically on your desk each day to make sure that you are constantly following your routine and improving your overall performance rather than just going around in circles. These will help you stay on track and also provide a very useful log that you can look back over as your trading career progresses. This will also help when you are working on your psychology and trying to improve your weaknesses as a trader.

Before we get into these 4 phases what we are going to do now is get you up to speed on everything you need in order to be able to actually sit at your desk and plan your trades.

Trading Routine

In this section we are going to break your daily trading down into the 4 phases we looked at earlier. Each of these phases incorporates the tools and the flow that we have just covered here.

The 4 phases that every trader should go through are:

1. Knowledge phase
2. Analysis phase
3. Execution phase
4. Review phase