Your Trading Plan Is Everything You Need
Imagine yourself having the perfect trading plan. It suits your psychological needs and lifestyle. Yet, you're not confident in your strategy. Do you follow your trading plan? Or do you close winners early and take a full 1R loss on losers? This is what happened to me.
Why Trading?
I took up trading because it sounds like a very lucrative side hustle. Learning how to achieve a 1% profit can scale my earnings. A 1% gain on a $1,000 account is $10, but the same 1% gain on a $100,000 account is $1,000. This offers significant leverage of my time. This means that if I succeed in building trading as a career, I do not have to survive on a 9 - 5 job, paying me for 8 hours of my day. I can enjoy life wherever and whenever I want. I can take a day trip to Japan for some sushi and be back home at night in my bed to sleep. I want to be a very successful person, having everything I want, not worrying if I can afford to buy the latest iPhone.
The Plan
So my career plan is to build up my prop firm funded account into the 7 digits. Get consistent 4 digits payout per month. Build my personal trading account from the prop firms profits. I built my plan so that I will not deviate from what I want to achieve. I have to follow a step by step method to achieve what I want. There are also contingency plan. For example, if I do not succeed in trading, at least I have my day job as a safety net. Survival comes first. If you worry about putting food on the table or paying your bills, you should refocus your priorities.
This is exactly the same as a trading plan. Your trading plan is same as your career plan. You have your entry criteria. When price gives you confirmation, you take a trade. When price does X, you close the trade. When price does Y, you move your stop loss. When price does Z, you take partial profits. You have a step by step method to guide your trades.
Be honest with yourself. How many times have you broken your trading rules this month? How many times have you deviated from your trading plan this month? My number is 3 this month. Why? Greed. Overconfidence. Hopeful. I was greedy as my trades have tight stop losses and I was expecting price to do what I expected it to do. Everything lined up. Multi-timeframe directions, liquidity, and volume all pointed to a high probability trade. It's near a high-impact news event. My position was in a drawdown. 2 minutes before the news, my trading plan indicated that I should close the trade now. I closed 2 eyes. Went down to the 5 seconds chart. It's 08:29:50. The price is starting to turn volatile. My heart is pumping from all the adrenaline. 08:29:59.. 08:30:00. The price shot up taking me out. What happened next, is as you guessed it. Price went up too fast. Slippage occurred, resulting in a loss of -3% instead of the expected -0.5% if I had followed my trading plan. Yes I still do make mistakes.
Compounding Effect
This 3% loss might seem small to some of you. 1 or 2 winning trades can cover this loss. Imagine if I took 3 of such trades in a week. That's already close to a 10% loss. This will be a huge deal to your trading psychology. The risk of these high-risk trades might seem worthy to you. But they can't give you enough assurance that you will achieve positive results in the long term. There are a lot of uncertainty during red folder news release. Price moves very fast, and might take you out before moving in your direction. Spread increase and could take you out even before the price hits your stop loss.
You are not following your trading plan by taking such trades again and again. You are building very bad habits. You are developing your attitude and habit in a wrong way. You're training yourself to take trades based on gut feeling and emotions. You should be using a solid trading plan which has proven (I hope) to be profitable. You can only achieved this through many hours of backtesting.
Habits are hard to change. By developing your trading attitude in the wrong way, it will be hard for you to be profitable. You're relying on luck in trading, and luck is not a decent trading strategy nor trading plan. Bad trading habits can lead to serious consequences. You could over-risk, over-leverage and even over-trade. You will take on more losses than you wanted. All these compounds your trading account in the wrong direction. What you want is to compound positive actions and bring your account equity upwards. Without positive actions, you are reinforcing negative actions and attract losses.
Deviation From Your Trading Plan
Taking trades that deviate from your trading strategy is a no go, even if it ends up being a winner. This could be a lucky trade. Luck is not a sustainable trading strategy. What if you did this again and the trade turns out to be a winner again? It will inflate your ego and lead to more of such trades. When you luck runs out, you will find that you lose more than you win.
To be successful, you have to identify bad trades and cut them from your trade executions. Many times your trading results will improve by eliminating all the bad trades. Finding ways to improve your risk-to-reward ratio or your win rate is not the only way.
You build success through consistency and repetition. If you’re not putting in the work day in and day out, you will not succeed. To succeed, you have to do it even when no one is watching you. You have to follow strictly to your trading plans. You have to do it when you do not have an accountability partner. One day, you will get your “overnight success” because you’ve been putting in all the work consistently. No one says it’s going to be easy.
Transformation
The day that my trading changed was when I started to plan out what I want to do with my life. I'm 30 this year. How many more decades do I have left? I do not want to slog for another 30 years working in a 9 - 5. I do not want to squeeze in a crowded public transport every morning to go office to do work that I could have done at home.
I have my personal finance all planned out. Next, I planned out my trading career path. Knowing my personal finance ins and outs are the most important criteria in setting my path. I know on average how much do I need a month to survive and for entertainment. Let's say I need $3,000 a month to have a decent standard of living. I know my trading strategy can yield me an average of 2% a month. If I work backwards, I would need a $150,000 account. This can be done through funded prop firm accounts.
I gave myself 1 year to get a funded account, and to get my first payout. I started small. Started out with 10k challenges. The only rule I have, is to follow strictly to my trading plans that I've backtested for hundreds of hours. I gave myself permission to fail. I allocate enough budget for my challenges every month. I failed many challenges. I passed some, but did not manage to clear phase 2 challenges. I tried and tried again.
3 May 2023 is the day of my first prop firm payout. It's only $200 post-profit split. Yet, this shows me what I can achieve by following my trading plans. This shows me what I can achieve by taking the same trades over and over again. Again, I'm still doing the same things over and over again, following my trading plan. Happy to share that I have another profit split incoming in June next month.
Trading Psychology
“There are two kinds of people: Those who think they can, and those who think they can’t, and they’re both right.”
- Henry Ford
Things will never be easy. Think about it. If you want 6-pack abs, it’s going to take you hard work and consistency over a long period of time. People want it to be easy. They crave for instant gratification. The reason why 6-pack abs is so sought after is because it’s hard to get. If having 6-pack abs is easy to get, then everyone can get it. If everyone has it, then it will lose its prestige and value.
Same goes for trading. If trading was so easy like following a trading plan, then everyone will be able to be profitable. Remember that 95% of the traders lose money. Constructing your trading plan might be easy, but executing is hard. What will you do if you're on a losing streak? Will you have the mental strength to execute the same trades that fit your trading plan? Do you doubt your trading strategy?
How A Trading Plan Should Look Like
1. Markup your chart. Mark the areas such as liquidity zone, point of interests, liquidity grab, direction of the market and the demand and supply zones. Do your multi-timeframe analysis here. Remember that high probability trade is to buy at discount levels, and sell at premium levels.
2. Set alert at your point of interests (Where to buy and sell)
3. Write down your analysis on the chart. If the price hits your point of interest, I would expect X to happen. When X happens, I will do Y.
4. When the alert goes off, go back to your chart and see if your analysis in step 3 still holds.
5a. If yes, mark out roughly where your stop loss and profit target will be. See if the RR is decent enough. If yes, then wait for the price to give you a confirmation. If no, either wait for a refined entry on the lower timeframe, or to wait for another confirmation.
5b. If not, repeat step 1.
6. Once price gives you a confirmation, calculate the lot size based on your risk management.
7. Once you're in the trade, you can either forget about your trade and let it hit TP or SL, or actively manage your position. This will depend on how you backtested your strategy.
8. Once your trade hits the TP or SL, journal it. Record your entry, take profit and stop loss. Take screenshots. Record your emotions and feelings before, during and after the trade.
Mentor
Creating a trading plan is 1 part of the trading puzzle you need to piece together. Trading strategy and psychology are other important components. They will make or break you, and your trading account. I have various mentors at different stages of my trading career. They helped me in their own ways, and shaping who I am today. I can confidently say that without either one of my mentors, I will not have found any successes in trading yet. I'd still drift around, looking for the next holy grail.
Stay consistent. Stay safe. Success is just around the corner.
If you enjoy such content, feel free to click the like button and subscribe for more.
Let me know what are your thoughts and learning points in the comments below so others can learn from you too!
Please let me know what kind of topic you would like to read next :)
Happy weekend!
Why Trading?
I took up trading because it sounds like a very lucrative side hustle. Learning how to achieve a 1% profit can scale my earnings. A 1% gain on a $1,000 account is $10, but the same 1% gain on a $100,000 account is $1,000. This offers significant leverage of my time. This means that if I succeed in building trading as a career, I do not have to survive on a 9 - 5 job, paying me for 8 hours of my day. I can enjoy life wherever and whenever I want. I can take a day trip to Japan for some sushi and be back home at night in my bed to sleep. I want to be a very successful person, having everything I want, not worrying if I can afford to buy the latest iPhone.
The Plan
So my career plan is to build up my prop firm funded account into the 7 digits. Get consistent 4 digits payout per month. Build my personal trading account from the prop firms profits. I built my plan so that I will not deviate from what I want to achieve. I have to follow a step by step method to achieve what I want. There are also contingency plan. For example, if I do not succeed in trading, at least I have my day job as a safety net. Survival comes first. If you worry about putting food on the table or paying your bills, you should refocus your priorities.
This is exactly the same as a trading plan. Your trading plan is same as your career plan. You have your entry criteria. When price gives you confirmation, you take a trade. When price does X, you close the trade. When price does Y, you move your stop loss. When price does Z, you take partial profits. You have a step by step method to guide your trades.
Be honest with yourself. How many times have you broken your trading rules this month? How many times have you deviated from your trading plan this month? My number is 3 this month. Why? Greed. Overconfidence. Hopeful. I was greedy as my trades have tight stop losses and I was expecting price to do what I expected it to do. Everything lined up. Multi-timeframe directions, liquidity, and volume all pointed to a high probability trade. It's near a high-impact news event. My position was in a drawdown. 2 minutes before the news, my trading plan indicated that I should close the trade now. I closed 2 eyes. Went down to the 5 seconds chart. It's 08:29:50. The price is starting to turn volatile. My heart is pumping from all the adrenaline. 08:29:59.. 08:30:00. The price shot up taking me out. What happened next, is as you guessed it. Price went up too fast. Slippage occurred, resulting in a loss of -3% instead of the expected -0.5% if I had followed my trading plan. Yes I still do make mistakes.
Compounding Effect
This 3% loss might seem small to some of you. 1 or 2 winning trades can cover this loss. Imagine if I took 3 of such trades in a week. That's already close to a 10% loss. This will be a huge deal to your trading psychology. The risk of these high-risk trades might seem worthy to you. But they can't give you enough assurance that you will achieve positive results in the long term. There are a lot of uncertainty during red folder news release. Price moves very fast, and might take you out before moving in your direction. Spread increase and could take you out even before the price hits your stop loss.
You are not following your trading plan by taking such trades again and again. You are building very bad habits. You are developing your attitude and habit in a wrong way. You're training yourself to take trades based on gut feeling and emotions. You should be using a solid trading plan which has proven (I hope) to be profitable. You can only achieved this through many hours of backtesting.
Habits are hard to change. By developing your trading attitude in the wrong way, it will be hard for you to be profitable. You're relying on luck in trading, and luck is not a decent trading strategy nor trading plan. Bad trading habits can lead to serious consequences. You could over-risk, over-leverage and even over-trade. You will take on more losses than you wanted. All these compounds your trading account in the wrong direction. What you want is to compound positive actions and bring your account equity upwards. Without positive actions, you are reinforcing negative actions and attract losses.
Deviation From Your Trading Plan
Taking trades that deviate from your trading strategy is a no go, even if it ends up being a winner. This could be a lucky trade. Luck is not a sustainable trading strategy. What if you did this again and the trade turns out to be a winner again? It will inflate your ego and lead to more of such trades. When you luck runs out, you will find that you lose more than you win.
To be successful, you have to identify bad trades and cut them from your trade executions. Many times your trading results will improve by eliminating all the bad trades. Finding ways to improve your risk-to-reward ratio or your win rate is not the only way.
You build success through consistency and repetition. If you’re not putting in the work day in and day out, you will not succeed. To succeed, you have to do it even when no one is watching you. You have to follow strictly to your trading plans. You have to do it when you do not have an accountability partner. One day, you will get your “overnight success” because you’ve been putting in all the work consistently. No one says it’s going to be easy.
Transformation
The day that my trading changed was when I started to plan out what I want to do with my life. I'm 30 this year. How many more decades do I have left? I do not want to slog for another 30 years working in a 9 - 5. I do not want to squeeze in a crowded public transport every morning to go office to do work that I could have done at home.
I have my personal finance all planned out. Next, I planned out my trading career path. Knowing my personal finance ins and outs are the most important criteria in setting my path. I know on average how much do I need a month to survive and for entertainment. Let's say I need $3,000 a month to have a decent standard of living. I know my trading strategy can yield me an average of 2% a month. If I work backwards, I would need a $150,000 account. This can be done through funded prop firm accounts.
I gave myself 1 year to get a funded account, and to get my first payout. I started small. Started out with 10k challenges. The only rule I have, is to follow strictly to my trading plans that I've backtested for hundreds of hours. I gave myself permission to fail. I allocate enough budget for my challenges every month. I failed many challenges. I passed some, but did not manage to clear phase 2 challenges. I tried and tried again.
3 May 2023 is the day of my first prop firm payout. It's only $200 post-profit split. Yet, this shows me what I can achieve by following my trading plans. This shows me what I can achieve by taking the same trades over and over again. Again, I'm still doing the same things over and over again, following my trading plan. Happy to share that I have another profit split incoming in June next month.
Trading Psychology
“There are two kinds of people: Those who think they can, and those who think they can’t, and they’re both right.”
- Henry Ford
Things will never be easy. Think about it. If you want 6-pack abs, it’s going to take you hard work and consistency over a long period of time. People want it to be easy. They crave for instant gratification. The reason why 6-pack abs is so sought after is because it’s hard to get. If having 6-pack abs is easy to get, then everyone can get it. If everyone has it, then it will lose its prestige and value.
Same goes for trading. If trading was so easy like following a trading plan, then everyone will be able to be profitable. Remember that 95% of the traders lose money. Constructing your trading plan might be easy, but executing is hard. What will you do if you're on a losing streak? Will you have the mental strength to execute the same trades that fit your trading plan? Do you doubt your trading strategy?
How A Trading Plan Should Look Like
1. Markup your chart. Mark the areas such as liquidity zone, point of interests, liquidity grab, direction of the market and the demand and supply zones. Do your multi-timeframe analysis here. Remember that high probability trade is to buy at discount levels, and sell at premium levels.
2. Set alert at your point of interests (Where to buy and sell)
3. Write down your analysis on the chart. If the price hits your point of interest, I would expect X to happen. When X happens, I will do Y.
4. When the alert goes off, go back to your chart and see if your analysis in step 3 still holds.
5a. If yes, mark out roughly where your stop loss and profit target will be. See if the RR is decent enough. If yes, then wait for the price to give you a confirmation. If no, either wait for a refined entry on the lower timeframe, or to wait for another confirmation.
5b. If not, repeat step 1.
6. Once price gives you a confirmation, calculate the lot size based on your risk management.
7. Once you're in the trade, you can either forget about your trade and let it hit TP or SL, or actively manage your position. This will depend on how you backtested your strategy.
8. Once your trade hits the TP or SL, journal it. Record your entry, take profit and stop loss. Take screenshots. Record your emotions and feelings before, during and after the trade.
Mentor
Creating a trading plan is 1 part of the trading puzzle you need to piece together. Trading strategy and psychology are other important components. They will make or break you, and your trading account. I have various mentors at different stages of my trading career. They helped me in their own ways, and shaping who I am today. I can confidently say that without either one of my mentors, I will not have found any successes in trading yet. I'd still drift around, looking for the next holy grail.
Stay consistent. Stay safe. Success is just around the corner.
If you enjoy such content, feel free to click the like button and subscribe for more.
Let me know what are your thoughts and learning points in the comments below so others can learn from you too!
Please let me know what kind of topic you would like to read next :)
Happy weekend!
Prop Firm Funded Trader
Find out more about me here: linktr.ee/kt_fx
Find out more about me here: linktr.ee/kt_fx
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