Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Reflections on Trading Processes

What is your trading process?

* How do you generate your best trade ideas?

* How do you manage risk most effectively?

* How do you manage positions most effectively to get the most out of trade ideas?

* How do you most effectively manage yourself and your emotions during trading?

* How do you prepare for market days most effectively?

* How do you best review markets and trading performance for optimal learning?

What I find is that the traders who have been successful over the long haul know the answers to these questions and also have very distinctive answers.

Like Toyota or UPS, they have developed their own, unique processes that are both efficient and effective. Success is a function of refining processes over time and becoming ever more consistent in following those processes.

If you *know* your processes, you can more readily develop confidence in them. Many times that is the difference between making the good trade and not; avoiding the bad trade and not.

Half of the challenge of trading is finding your best practices; the other half is implementing them with fidelity and consistency.

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