Great post from Brett Steenbarger

Check this link out:

http://traderfeed.blogspot.com/2009/03/four-best-practices-for-maintaining.html

its about "Four Best Practices for Maintaining Your Focus on Markets "
mental preparation
taking a break from trading
self-regulation strategies
goal-setting

Toolzzz

Besides a broker you can rely on you need some kind of tools, or at least, one tool.

In the past i often focused on permanent looking for new great holy grail tools.
Well, there are many trading tools offered by many companies with tons of varieties for anything.

I tell you what i found for myself.

One thing is clear, if you want to trade, you need someting to visualize what you do.
So you need a CHARTING TOOL ;-)

There are many vendors for charts. Some are expensive, some are verry expensive,
some are mid-priced and some are for free; as in most other businesses...

I had charting tools from many vendors in every price category.
On crucial thing for me was that the more money a tool costs, the more i´m under presure to get in the money again. So when i pay 150 USD a month for a charting tool, then i have to make sure, that my income is bigger then my outcome... ...again like in most other businesses...

Right now i´m using a free tool, called QuoteTraker with the IB-Datafeed. Right now i could afford to switch to other charting tools but everytime i get to the point where i tend again to swich the vendor, i ask me --> WHY.
QuoteTraker is easy to use, QuoteTraker gives me more effort then i could expect for paying not a dime. This does not have to be my final decition, but for now i stay with this combination, IB+Quotetracker.
Should i sometimes swich again, i would switch to esignal. The reason is, that some things i do manualy every day could be done automaticly with their efs-studies. However, its a double-edged sword, because now i have to be attentive all the time and "feel" with the market. When everything would be plotted automaticly, then my manulay work would be reduced, but would it effect my trading results in a positive manner ? Well, i dont know yet, but who knows, may i find it out somtimes in the future.

Another point why i stay with QT+IB is that i just dont need complicated features or indicators or one of all this crazy things that many tools offer.
What i need is a Chart that shows me the price- and the volume action.
Thats it. Anything else is not important in my trading.

What other tools could be usefull.

Analyser:
Well i recently had a tool for tracking my trades and analysing them in many fashions.
I´m not longer using this tool because i said to myself, hey, this is a good idea to log every
trade you make, but why paying someone else for something, that i could do by myself.
So instead of uploading every trade in this tool, i log every trade i make by myself in a similar manner. When using IB, you have the possibility to modify trading exports in any way you want.
Put them in a excel file, analyse it, thats it. This in combination in making a screenshot of every trade and putting all the details in this chart and saving it for further reference is all i need.
I´m happy with this and i tell you something. Focusing more on my trading logs is one of the most important things that made my trading more successful.

Scanner:
As most of you know, there are many vendors out there who offer scanners for probably anything you can think about. I was also using one of this and at the end of the day i have to say, that they cant give me more, then i can get for free as well. Sure, with a free source you cant check of right now a share´s price is crossing the DMA from a SMA over the EMA in relation to the DJ and outperforming the S&P samethime while making a new high and trading outside the previous day range. But heck, what do you need this stuff to ? I dont need it, so i dont use such a scanner anymore.

Excel:
yep, i use it and i analyse my trades up and down. Why do i do this ?
Well, because this makes me successful. You job does not end with hitting buy or sell.
More important are your preperations and your postprocessing.

Ok, thats it for now.

NEXT: shares, futures, options, cfd´s or other exotic trading vehicles ?

Broker

When you plan to start trading you´ll come earlier or later to the point where you have to make your decition about the broker you´ll go with.

During my trading "carreer" i had at least 10 different brokers, all with advantages and disatvantages.
At the end of the day you´ll have to realize, that there are only a few criterias the broker must met.

In my opinion a broker has to have:
1) a HIGH reliability !
this comes first because any system outage could cost you more then you can imagine.
2) a LOW commission strukture !
Because your commission strukture will judge about your profit and loss. The more commission you pay, the more you finance others.

Thats it. Sounds to easy ? Nope, thats all you need.
Sure, there are some soft criterias but at the end of the day you can summarise the hard criterias to the named two.

Besides Interactive Brokers there are only a few brokers that meet this criterias in combination.

be ready when your setup occurs

My trading day ended with a small profit. I only missed one trade and i dont know exactly why. i just wasnt ready to put the order in or was distracted by another trade. However, when you trade a specific setup, than one key is to be ready whe the setup occurs.

The one trade i missed was the one that was running the biggest distance. Sure, sometimes it can be a looser but as long as your risk revard ratio is ok, your setup has a high degree of the possibility to work in a correct way and you take them as they come across, you´ll be on the green side ;-)

One hard part today was again to just focus on the setups i am looking for. i entered 2 trades which i bailed asap, because i had to realize, that i am in a trade that is not valid.
So the entry was a mistake, but to go out of the trade asap was the correct answer to this situation.

stay tuned

more to come

For march i plan to write more about the things i do.

What do i do ?

What do i think is important and why ?

What tools do i use ?
What tools did i use but dont do anymore and why.

What broker do i use and why ?
What broker i used but dont use anymore and why.

I´m also going to post some charts and explain things directly related to them.

Have a nice evening everyone.
I´m looking foreward to my 2nd comment ;-)
everyone is welcome to make the next step ;-)

new month, new post ;-)

Hello everyone,

like i wrote on January 25th, i´m back with a plan and i trade my plan. Since the year started, i was focusing on my motto TRADE THE RULES, much more then last year.
I´m still in something like a developing stage. I´m not in a robot-mode yet. What does this mean ? Well if you have rules, then you should follow the rules. However, this is easyer said then done.

Everyday i make my trading log, i make a chart screen of every stock i traded, put everything in it (entry, exit, reason, size, result...) and review it. And one thing is clear, if i would ONLY TRADE THE RULES theni would be more up then i´m right now.

I dont like to complain, becaus i do a quiet good job so far, my account is back in a solid green area and the reason for that is that i was trading the rules.
Without trading the rules i still would have wild account volatility. I´d trade without control and without a chance to say, why did i do this and that etc.

However, maybe some of you have the same problems i have. Today was such a chaotic day. I started the day with a losing trade, which is not a problem, i made this small loss back (which was cuttet short) and i´ve let my winners run. After 1 hour of trading i was up 5R. But what happened then ? I fell into something i still cant define. 1 hour is over, i made 5times more then i risk each trade, the rule is to stop at that point. What happened ? I traded further, the first loss against the time rule came, the next, the next, the next and so on. It was just a commission generator while going more and more into the choppy stage.

I realy plan, to never do this again. After 1 hour of trading my trading day has finished.
over and out, no matter what. i know why. This is one of my rules and i TRADE THE RULES.

Thanx to Trader-X

I like to thank Trader-X for making the first comment !

Thank You :-)