One of the truly standout best practices of great traders is practice itself. The quality of the review and learning processes for the best traders is quite different from average efforts. The good trader keeps a journal and goes over performance and might write down a few ideas for improvement. The better trader makes active use of that journal to structure specific goals for the coming trading session/week and then holds themselves accountable for progress on those goals in their daily review. The great trader reviews not only performance but also actively reviews the markets, the opportunities that appeared during the day, and how they could have exploited those opportunities. In other words, the best traders are distinguished by the *activity* of their learning processes, as they dig for details about how they could better spot opportunities, how they could better express and size their trades, how they could better manage the risk/reward of the trades, etc.
A best practice in trading is sustained deep learning: not just reviewing, but reliving every aspect of one's trades. This means that the best traders are spending as much time in preparing and learning as in trading, which in turn helps them become highly sensitive to situations when markets change their behavior. When each day of trading brings at least one lesson that is intensively learned and reviewed, the cumulative impact of the development is impressive.
A great way to identify who's great in markets is to observe what they're doing when markets aren't open.
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