6 Tricks To Avoid Boredom While Trading

Have you ever found yourself during trading hours where the market is really slow and you feel like you have not placed enough trades? Well, serving as a junior moderator for one of the largest trading room on Wall Street, here at Warrior Trading I use to notice a large number of traders taking way too many trades even when conditions weren’t favorable.

In fact, we often say that the first two hours after the market opens are when most of the biggest moves tend to occur and that’s why as day traders we must pay close attention during this time. Past that time, unless breaking news occurs, the average range is likely to decrease dramatically as the volume dries up.

Usually on a choppy day, the situation is even worse because opportunities we were hoping to see during the most promising time of the day did not show up and is likely that we will not have any trades worth taking for the day and this can be frustrating.

This is where inexperienced traders tend to make costly mistakes. You can safely assume that if the day hasn’t presented great opportunities past the first couple of hours, then it’s not likely going to happen for the rest of the day. The issue is, many traders get caught in a rush of making money and, more often than not, they end up digging themselves into a deeper hole foolishly acting like there is no tomorrow (about this, please have a look to my previous article here).

Being Passionate About Trading Doesn’t Imply Over Trading

We all have been there and I can guarantee that the ability to master discipline is one of the hardest to achieve as a trader. Truth is that being passionate about trading doesn’t imply over trading so here are six practical ways to focus on improving your trading while not actually executing any trades:

• Reviewing your trading metrics will help you better understanding what you are best (or worst) at, what your accuracy is, your own go-to strategy, your ideal sizing and exposure. I highly recommend doing it on a weekly basis but doing it daily would be even better;

• Keeping a daily journal is a great way to avoid over trading. Information to keep track of includes the stage of planning the trades and a thorough description about the emotional state felt during the different phases of managing the trades. I wrote an article about it recently and I suggest you to read it here;

• Reading books or articles about trading just like you’re doing now is a powerful technique to keep ourselves updated about what’s going on as well as staying motivated on the path of becoming consistently profitable;

• Contributing to the trading community via actively sharing thoughts and ideas into the chat-room that you belong to is the greatest act in giving your knowledge back from a place where tons of useful tips get posted daily. The trading community needs you as much as you need it;

• Revisiting lessons from the trading course will help keep the information fresh in your mind as you apply them in your trading. Doing this during lunch time can be powerful and will prevent you from entering into a trade during the worst time of the day;

• Watching price action is a must in order to grow into reading the market mechanics and accrue the required level of experience to perform on a professional level. So, if you can’t control your urge to trade, I’d recommend you to shut off your trading software in order to focus just on watching the charts as the action unfolds live.

“Are you bored with life? Then throw yourself into some work you believe in with all your heart, live for it, die for it, and you will find happiness that you had thought could never be yours.” – Dale Carnegie

Thanks for reading, I’ll talk to you in chat-room.

Trade safe,

Roberto Barbaro