Here is the link to the first in this series of proposed posts on trading for review.
This post deals with your business plan, your mission statement and your statement of personal belief. The nuts and bolts of building your trading business.
Many lump trading plan and business plan together. It is my opinion that they are different. Parts of your business plan will be incorporated into you trading plans. Your business plan is the overall framework of how you plan to run your business. Your trading plan would be a specific trade or trade setup and how that trade is entered, managed and exited. Trading plans will be dealt with in another post.
Business Plan
Here are some things that can and should be addressed in your business plan:
1. When will you trade? Of perhaps more importance, when will you not trade? Some suggestions: do not trade when your tired, going through emotional stress, under the influence of alcohol or drugs for example. I also have rules such as after three losing days in a row, take the next day off. After a huge day (I have a metric for that), take the next day off, etc.
2. What will you trade? There is a lot to be said for becoming expert in ONE trading instrument. For example, I know a trader who ONLY day trades INTC (Intel). He has for years and makes a very good living doing that with a $100,000 account. Something to think about for you stock de jour day traders. Every single stock has at least one guy that just trades that stock. You want to go up against that?
3. What kind of equipment will you use? How will you maintain contact with your broker in an emergency? Power failure, etc.
4. How much trading capital will you risk in a single position? How much in a pure directional play? How much within the same sector/market. etc? At what point in draw down will you suspend trading?
5. What methodology, if any, will you seek to use to trade?
6. Are you going to trade as an individual or as an entity (LLC, corporation, etc)?
7. Schedule your time for trading activities away from actual trading (study, chart analysis, etc). In other words, get some kind of schedule or rhythm.
8. what kind of time frame are you going to trade in? Day trader means NO overnight positions in day trades! Big error in day trading is to carry over positions to the next day. IF your trading by plan, you will never allow that to happen. It is essential that you match your time frame to your lifestyle. Do NOT change your lifestyle to accommodate a trading time frame! That seems logical but some decide to become day traders and up and just quit their day job. NOT a great idea unless you have already become a consistent trader. By that I mean, consistently extracting capital from markets regardless of time frame traded!
This is by no means an exhaustive list but just some ideas to get you started.
Mission Statement
Before attempting to understand markets, you must understand yourself! This is your personal goals and mission. You must have a guiding purpose to your life! Most people do nothave any kind of purpose to their lives and wander through life aimlessly, blown around every time the wind changes. IF this describes you, your chances of being successful at trading will be severely limited by your lack of a defining mission in your life.
Mission statements are not fun for most people and most traders will not evaluate their lives in conjunction with their trading! Here is the typical response…well, my mission is to make a lot of money. That does not get it at all as that is not a mission! It is also not a strong motivator! If it were, why are wealthy people such a minority? Your mission as a trader is totally and completely impacted by your mission in life. Determining your life mission is one of the most powerful and important things that you can ever do.
How else can you define what is important to you, interact with other people and obtain self satisfaction as you go through life? How much you can live your life fully and with joy is determined by your mission in life! Here is what you must define: 1) What are your guiding principles and what do you value? Answer those two questions and you will have more knowledge about yourself than perhaps you ever have before. This is some of the hard work required to become a successful trader. The work few will undertake and maybe now you begin to see why most fail at trading?.
Statement Of Personal Belief
Certain key beliefs which have absolutely nothing to do with markets will determine your success in the markets. These are beliefs about yourself. What do you believe your capable of doing? Is trading and/or success important to you? How worthy of success do you believe yourself to be? A weak personal belief system can undermine and even kill your ability to trade even a great trading system or methodology. You must believe in what you are doing and be doing something that you believe in. Nothing short of that will suffice. This is where the rubber meets the road. Where your mission in life meets trading.
Statement of personal beliefs, by their very nature, are very personal. I will share with you mine. It was written many years ago and is as true today, for me, as the day it was written.
"I believe I possess all of the abilities innately (inside of me) to become a top trader. I believe I have the ability to learn from myself and from others the knowledge and skills to the excellent trader that I am. What I do as a trader is honorable as I supply liquidity to markets. Without people, such as myself, markets would not exist. My ability as a trader helps me, my family as well as my country and humanity as a whole."
I hope this has been of some help in your journey as a trader. Remember: remarkable traders do remarkable things. Separate yourself from the crowd. You deserve what you earn through hard work.
