You should keep a trading journal of every trade you make! Backtest
every system for at least 1,000 trades! Brush your teeth before bed!
All
of this is sound advice. However, how many traders actuallyfollow this
advice? Do you? I would bet that less then a third of you reading this
article keep a trading journal. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not special. I
didn’t keep a record of my trades during the first few years of my
trading career. This changed one year ago. Here are the tips that helped
me to finally create this habit. These rules are not specific to
trading and can be used to build any habit in any area of your life!
The 1 Minute Rule
How do we get on the path of building a habit? This is where the 1
minute rule comes in! If your goal is to keep a trading journal, at
the end of every trading day, take one minute and write down your
trades. Even simpler, at the close of trading just write down 1
sentence. This could be your best or worst trade of the day, your
trading mood, or a combination of both. Here’s an example:
‘’May22nd: I took a signal where there wasn’t any and I proceeded to lose 4000 as the Nifty moved against my position’’
Based on a true story. Okay it IS a true story. But as I started to
write this down in my journal, I found myself needing to explain why the
trade was a mistake. And I wrote more then one sentence, a lot more.
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