Nothing revolutionary about it, but a lot of common sense.

Here’s the exercise with some of my personal observations added:

Pick ONE trading signal. It doesn’t matter, what signal exactly, but it’s important that it should be one you consider reliable and really intend to start your career as a consistently profitable trader with trading this signal (I will explain in some of further posts, why it is so important to start trading with minimal number of different signals).

It should be not just some entry technique, but a complete one-signal trading strategy. Define everything in the form of rules: entry, open trade management, exit etc. Get it all down to “if, then” algorithm. You should make it as close to completely automated, no thinking execution of all rules, as possible.

Decide, when you are going to start trading it. Let it be exact hours of the day, say only from 9:30AM to 11:00 AM EST and never during the other time of the day, even if you see a setup just one minute before or after the time “allowed” to you by yourself.

Then create a small spreadsheet or simply draw a table on the paper. Let it contain 20 rows. These rows will be number of trades you are going to take. After closing every trade you will comment it in a corresponding table row. Profit or loss amount, when and why taken and closed etc.

Choose trading size, which you will be comfortable with even if you lose 20 trades in a row. This is psychological training, not golden rush, so your goal right now is to develop good trader’s habits rather than make big money. If you are not comfortable to losing 20 times in a row even on one contract of your current instrument, then paper trade it while you do the exercise.

Now it’s time to trade. Your job is to take EVERY occurrence of your SINGLE signal. No exceptions. No bias. No opinion. You see something that suits your rules on the chart, you execute.

As mentioned above (and it’s important to repeat), only make conclusions and write comments in your table AFTER the trade is closed. Or if your trading frequency is high, after your trading day is over. Nothing should distract you from trading during the session itself.

If you for some reason violated one of your rules and took some “not allowed” signal or didn’t take “your” signal (doesn’t matter if it was a winner or a loser), comment everything about this case in details… And start your 20 trades in a row drill FROM SCRATCH. That means, if you perfectly executed 19 trades and made a mistake on 20th, you must start 20 trades in a row again.

It may look like a very simple, even primitive exercise, but if you take time to seriously perform it, you will be surprised by the result. 

Wish you many profitable… no, not trades, years!