Planning and Executing Trades in the Real World

"No battle plan survives contact with the enemy," Field Marshall Helmuth Carl Bernard von Moltke once observed. What Clausewitz described as the "frictions" of war ensure that chance occurrences and the unexpected will interfere with the best laid plans. The task of the successful leader is to minimize these frictions with superior planning, but also to anticipate the unexpected and be ready to adjust plans accordingly.

We hear a great deal about formulating trading plans and the importance of sticking to plans. In the corporate world, business planning is vitally important--and yet those plans evolve with shifting economic conditions. Similarly, military strategies are carefully formulated, but tactics evolve as new information becomes available.

There is much more to successful trading than creating a plan and robotically following it. How do we adjust plans without abandoning them? How do we adapt to shifting market conditions without losing discipline?

I see little written on the real-world process of developing and executing plans; more on this topic shortly.

More:

Why Traders Plan Trades But Don't Trade Their Plans

Trading With a Plan

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