The ultimate goal of any trader like you is to consistently make a profit in the market that you chose to trade. To do so, you need to identify your edge in the market — which means learning different trading strategies and set-ups and find the best one that makes the most sense to you. For some, they are able to find their ‘holy grail’ in a few months and sometimes, it will take years of getting to know how the market works and your personal limitations as a trader.
You will experience failures, but that’s part of the process.
In this article, we’re going to tackle how you can find your bread-and-butter setups in the market.
How do we start trading the market?
When starting, we try to read as much reading material as we can through blogs, web articles or from the top recommended books we often hear. We also look for trading videos online created by highly-regarded traders and even follow some of these well-known traders who regularly display their skills in the market with their “trophy trades” or bagger trades on social media. We often dissect the average price of their port snaps, backtest it, and apply it on our own portfolio’s trades but sometimes, we can’t even manage the trade like they would and it often leads us to disappointments. We lack the experience and conviction they have with the setup. We don’t know whether it’s the 10th or the 100th time the said trader executed that setup or more importantly the amount of backtesting, dissecting, journaling, he has done behind his bagger trades. We might not even know whether that particular setup fits our trading profile or not. This bitter losing experience leads most of us to try out another setup and when we do, we lose more than what we can win, and then we begin again to search for another setup from another trader or trading book. The cycle goes on and on and on until we are burned and lost all of our capital.
Steps in finding your trading setup
Finding your niche setup in the market is no walk in the park. The reason behind that is because you’ll need to have the utmost discipline and commitment in tweaking and adjusting your trading setup.
Here are the steps to find the right trading setup for you:
1. Know your trading profile. Ask yourself questions such as:
a. Which setups can you trade while working on your day job?
b. Are you more fitted to trade setups with trend-following objective?
c. Do you want to trade bounce play setups but can only enter EOD (end of day)?
2. Back test, back test, and back test
a. Know why and how the setup works
b. Should you add an indicator to confirm your buy and sell signals for your setup?
3. Paper Trade
a. Try out the setup in real-time without using real money and make use of Virtual Trading to test your skills. Try https://www.investagrams.com/vTrade
4. Trade the setup using real money
a. Risk small/Allocate a small portion of your portfolio
5. Journal your trades (the most important step)
a. Record your entries, exits, and emotions during the trade
b. Review your data and reflect from it
c. You may start your trading journal adventure here: https://www.investagrams.com/TradeJournal/
Take one setup at a time. It’s best not to be called as someone who’s the jack of all trades or like a soldier who’s manning a machine gun shooting at everything. Instead, be more like a sniper, calmly waiting for his target and shooting with high accuracy.
As Bruce Lee puts it, “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”
Good luck on your trading!